'Who are you and why do you have my boyfriend's phone?'
'He left it in my car. You must be the blonde in the red dress? I'm the Lift driver who dropped you two off earlier.'
And with these words, the life of the brunette and t-shirt wearing Maya Maas is turned upside down. Having planned to surprise her boyfriend, she finds herself single and stranded in an unknown city on her birthday.
So when the mystery driver rescues Maya with the suggestion that she cheers herself up at a nearby beach town, she jumps at the chance to get things back on track. She wasn't expecting a personalised itinerary or the easy companionship that comes from opening up to a stranger via text, let alone the possibility it might grow into something more...
Maya Maas decides to surprise her boyfriend when he goes to California for work on her birthday weekend. She hops on a plane from New York and texts him from the airport. Except he doesn’t reply. And he keeps not replying to texts or calls. Until a stranger finally texts that he’s the Lift driver and David left his phone in the car. Then Maya finds out that her boyfriend is cheating on her. Well, isn’t that just a wonderful birthday present? Stuck in the airport with nowhere to go she opens up to the stranger and he suggests she forget the cheating ass and go enjoy herself at a small charming beach town instead. For once in her life Maya decides to take a leap of faith. But will she stick the landing or break a leg?
I’m going to start off by saying something harsh - Maya is such a wimp. Wow. Talk about someone drifting through life with no real direction and letting people walk all over her. Instead of taking control of her own destiny and writing a love story for herself (instead of for strangers), she just exists. However, you knew there was a however, right? However, Maya is not a hopeless case. She writes love stories for strangers she sees, so there is a spark in her. It just needs the right material and a good wind to get it blazing.
Enter the Lift driver who drops the bomb on her about her boyfriend. For the first time Maya does something crazy. She takes a stranger’s advice and lets him set her itinerary for her birthday. But then, she falls back into her old ways. Except, her old ways don’t really fit her anymore. They aren’t easy and comfortable like before. She’s changed. Thank fuck. And that’s when the book really takes off.
While Maya has me rolling my eyes all the time because maybe she’s a bit too flawed, I can’t help but cheer her on as she tries to find the Lift driver who has changed her life. The Lift driver is a great character, but who is he, really? It’s a mystery! The town sounds so charming I want to visit there right now. Or maybe even live there! I mean, what’s not to love?
If you like flawed characters and a mystery with romantic threads woven into every fiber of this story then you really need to pick this up.
As a child, Olivia not-so-quietly ‘observed’ (AKA bothered with countless questions) her grandfather — who worked for the biggest publishing house in Romania — edit hundreds of books. And when he wasn’t editing, he read. Everything, all the time. Just like her father, who wrote short sci-fi stories, and was set on building the largest library she’d ever seen and her mother who’s never found without a book…wherever she goes. Her love for words came naturally, and after studying marketing, communications & photography, Olivia worked as a journalist for a newspaper and news television network in Romania.
An unapologetic citizen of the world, she spent a few years in Greece, Sweden, France, before settling in sunny California with her photographer husband and young daughter, where she works in marketing and writes. Oh, and let's not forget the ever-growing menagerie that completes the family: Pumpkin, the Maine Coon mix, three black cats and a siamese kitten.
When she's not writing or thinking about writing, she reads (across genres), watches old movies and collects vintage books, vinyl records, and eerie paintings. She loves traveling (and can’t wait until she can do it again, safely), swimming, biking, hiking and of course, photography.
SOMEDAY IN PARIS, her debut, published by Aria Fiction/Head of Zeus in May 2020 became a B&N, Apple, Kobo and Amazon Top 100 Bestseller and was shortlisted for the Romantic Novel Awards 2021. Her second novel, THE MEETING POINT, a contemporary romcom set in Northern California, is set to be published as an e-book on September 2, 2021 and in paperback in December 2021 in the UK and March, 2022 in the US.
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