Athlone flirt

Playing Flirty

Shameez Patel

Hatchette

Review: Lauren O’Connor-May

I got very excited when I saw this book. A brown Capetonian author, writing about a leading, brown romance character. I wondered, are we finally getting a brown South African romance heroine.

Alas, no we are not. While elsewhere in the world romance characters have become more diverse, in South Africa we are still lagging behind in this department.

This story, set in San Diego, is about Rose, a semi-conservative office worker with a highly-detailed life plan. Her plan goes off the rails when three-months after she had scheduled her engagement on her colour-coded excel-spreadsheet life plan, her relationship with her long-term boyfriend Patrick appears to be going in the opposite direction instead.

She finds solace is game night, a weekly meet up with her set of quirky friends and archnemesis to play board games.

When a competition to develop a new board game has her digging out and re-evaluating her own un

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