The Launch Date by Annabelle Slator [ARC Review]

 *I’d like to thank NetGalley, Random House UK, and Annabelle Slator  for providing me with a free ARC in exchange for an honest review. 

“The Launch Date” is the debut novel by Annabelle and tells the story of how the development of the dating app ‘Ditto’ brought Grace and Eric together.

Grace Hasting, marketing manager at the successful dating app ‘Fate’ has lost her faith in love. After being dumped by her fiancé the day after their engagement, being continuously stuck in a circle of working overtime and doing the work for two, as well as fueling a feud with her rival/colleague Eric Bancroft, she is hanging by a thread. So when the chance of getting promoted, defeating her rival, and opening doors for more opportunity arises, she wants to grasp it by all means necessary. The only problem? Eric Bancroft also wants the position. Now they have to work together on the project. Not only forced to share their work, but also having to face what happened eight months ago, Grace finds herself in a conflict of love, success, and finally moving on.

“The Launch Date” is a contemporary office romance featuring the tropes of rivals-to-lovers, forced proximity, and fake dating. The story is completely told from Grace’s perspective, not featuring Eric’s POV. 

The story starts up pretty strong with introducing Grace as a person with great ambition, but filled with doubt. Her feud with Eric first appears more petty than anything, but it gets clear quickly that behind the bickering lays a long bygone misunderstanding and simmering attraction, Grace is not ready to acknowledge. But soon after both of them start going on their research dates, the plot starts dragging. Throughout the entire book they are on those research dates five to six times which I felt took away from the actual essence of the plot, especially as they did not have real conversions during those scenes and mostly just bickered which in their case is mild flirting. The betrayal of Eric was something that I didn't really get. For one, I think it’s lowkey illegal to access someone’s private info for personal use even if you work for the app you’re pulling it from. Secondly, I did not get why Grace was so deeply hurt by not being informed when it’s obvious that she could have simply done so herself, and avoided Eric for eight months after cancelling their friendship. After that her hesitation of accepting her feelings and brewing relationship with Eric felt a bit idiotic. Grace is a woman in her late twenties/early thirties, for her to behave in such a manner because of a boy seemed very silly to me. I also was bothered how the book did not address the fact that Grace is a total workaholic which certainly is not healthy. She works through her lunch break, does overtime or brings work home. Yet, even in the epilogue she is still working from home even though her guests are already arriving because she does “work-life-balance”. 

The thing I loved the most was the friend group around Grace. Her both roommates were fun to read about. Their overall dynamic was super entertaining, and their conversations certainly brought the plot along while the conversations between Grace and Eric mostly didn’t. I still wonder about Grace’s family. They were mentioned once during the engagement scene, but otherwise are never mentioned. Though I expect that her broken engagement and workaholic nature certainly affected that relationship as well. 

The time jumps confused me at times. There were a couple of scenes in which Grace has flashbacks, and sometimes I found it extremely confusing to differentiate between the present and the past. 

Overall, an interesting debut with potential but some difficulties in execution.