Love Rules

This is a strange chick-lit novel: we've got the character who's certain she's met true love (Thea), and the one who's settled down & should be living her happily-ever-after (Alice). But nothing is as good as it seems, and this book is a steep road that has many twists and turns as the characters face the reality (at times harsh) of the decisions they've made.I was very surprised by the ending, but found it good (and charming) nonetheless.I thought most characters were well developed, the pace was quite fast, and the dialogues and overall story very believable. I've had problems with some of Freya North's books in the past (Chloe & Polly), but Love Rules was a bittersweet story that I found quite endearing, if not because it's a more realistic way of painting chick-lit.

I really enjoyed this book. I got Pillow Talk from a friend and that set me off on Freya North. I love her style of storytelling and this book was very enjoyable. I couldn't put it down. Really worth the read. Enjoy!!

This is my favourite Freya North book. It is so different from all other chick lit books I have read, it is refreshing and edgy. The twist really makes you think. Very clever book.

A great read. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

For the first third of the book I wasn't sure how I was going to like the story, but once I got the rhythm, I LOVED it! The writing is good, the story is smart and I was so sorry to get to the last page. I particularly loved it because though it is light-hearted and has a light tone, it doesn't deliver the HEA you predict/expect (trying not to provide any spoilers here) and is therefore that much more satisfying. It is the perfect beach read. It is one of the books that will get you hooked on this author!

Thoroughly enjoyed this one, especially with the twists and turns.

I enjoyed this book. Didn't have to think too hard, but a nice escape!

I got 49% into this and I reached a stage where I was so bored I've packed it in. Can't be bothered reading anymore of it. I was at the point where Alice is on a working trip in France talking about motivational stuff and I glazed over. Then a Clare and Geoff were referred to like we were supposed to know who they were, yet I flicked back and they'd never been mentioned before !For some reason the author has chosen to go with American spelling so that was me irritated from page 2 with theorized, then realized and jeopardize. I stopped highlighting them after these examples.I found this description strange when talking about a girl-...'cheekbones now too sharp to be handsome'. Lady's Night should be Ladies' Night, mandolin should be mandoline, track used and not tack. THIS line had me beat, I'm afraid. All power to you if you can understand it because I can't..."....that made the ordeal easier for Saul was an inkling that Emma was actually charging her waterworks with a torrent not entirely commensurate with her distress". The charging mention is what I don't comprehend.My BIGGEST complaint was the amount of times additional hyphens were thrown in and no editing process corrected it. It was highly annoying-brides-maid, bath-room, grim-acing, out-rageous, snap-ping, lad-dish, rum-mage, break-fast and THEN missed one where it was needed with goose down. Remember I was only halfway through so you could double this amount up !! Frightful that nobody else picked them up if I did.I did like the analogy of a child's kiss that was described along with the waif mention, too. The story had been interesting up till this portion and I liked Thea's character most of all but it was starting to get extremely repetitive and dull.

Sometimes I enjoy a bit of light-hearted chick-lit, but this (my first encounter with Freya North) really was far too fluffy for me. There are promising elements but I found the writing poor and quite frustrating, many of the characters slightly unbelievable, and certain scenes so cringe-worthy I almost stopped reading.Love Rules centres on Thea and Alice, long-time best friends but polar opposites. After a series of failed relationships with the same (wrong) kind of man, Alice decides it's time to change her ways and get married. Thea has never been interested in flings and falling in lust, like Alice, instead waiting for her ideal man to appear and give her the fairytale relationship she's not prepared to compromise on. As Alice settles into life as a newly-wed, Thea meets Saul - who just might be the man of her dreams.All this happens in the early chapters of the book, and the rest (it's a fairly lengthy tome) follows the ups and downs of the girls' relationships with their men and with each other. Alice struggles to adapt to married life and Thea struggles with supporting her through it; Thea allows herself to get swept away and make some major life changes, only to find everything falling apart at a time where she doesn't have her best friend to lean on.So the story is fairly obviously quite fluffy and not exactly deep. I don't mind that in and of itself; sometimes that's just what you need. But it's the execution that bothered me, that really amplified the fluffiness and silliness (and not in a good way).Some thematic or plot aspects bothered me. For instance, these two girls are supposedly as tight as friends can be, relying on one another for almost everything and often prioritising each other over their partners. But this friendship just wasn't believable to me. It felt much more superficial than I think the author intended. I also found their desire to `workshop' everything incredibly irritating: friends share problems and help find solutions - that's just talking, not `workshopping'. And despite not appearing to have particularly high-flying jobs or moneyed backgrounds, both girls live fairly luxurious London lives that seemed slightly unrealistic to me.Other things were so bad as to almost be funny. There's a passage where Thea's occupation is described without it actually being specified. It's fairly obvious fairly quickly that she's a masseuse, but the passage is clearly written to try and make it sound like she might be involved in something far less wholesome. That's just unnecessary and unsophisticated, and not really funny at all in the way I assume it was intended to be. Likewise, there are numerous bedroom scenes which I had to start skipping over, they were so embarrassingly bad.I also found the narrative frustrating. Each chapter was supposedly told from the perspective of a particular character, but the author has a tendency to jump out of this and give us a thought, feeling or motivation from another character in the scene every so often. This makes it hard to feel you are actually looking at things from that main character's perspective, and disrupts the flow. More annoying were the occasional passages where the author suddenly starts speaking to the reader. These aren't marked out in any way, just slipped in every now and then, and really didn't work for me at all. It's a bit too contrived, I think it undermines the story if you need the author to interject and tell you what you should be thinking or wondering about, and it's slightly patronising too.On the positive side, Thea's story has at its heart an interesting dilemma, and one which did make me think about how I might act in her shoes. But it's probably a bit too drawn out (like the novel as a whole) and so her internal struggles and her conversations with those around her both become a bit repetitive and started to disengage me.I guess that for a very easy, disposable beach read, Love Rules fits the bill. But I think there are other, better options out there even for that kind of holiday or Sunday-afternoon reading, so I don't think I'll be turning to Freya North again.

I have never had the urge to write a review but this book certainly deserves one. The author is an absolute master regarding the twists and turns of her two main characters' love life. Best friends, Alice and Thea, are bosom buddies from infancy. Neither of them can make one decision without the other's blessing and regardless of the outcome, they both have their own morals which has given me an enormous insight concerning infidelity and how I would react to it. I just loved their partners even though I didn't agree with any of at times. Saul, Thea's soulmate , deceived me beyond belief, and Mark, a really nice guy that lacks a little backbone, is Alice's husband and forever friend was in another world while his wife was getting up to...I won't tell you what! A really good read, however, at times I must admit to flipping a few pages. All in all, it's worth reading.