Boyfriend Material

"Boyfriend Material is the book that I recommend to people after they finish Red, White, and Royal Blue . It’s that very classic, traditional story of opposites attract, where you have this upstanding, attractive, and handsome guy put together with a kind of messy and chaotic character. Although classifying it that way makes it sound like Boyfriend Material and Red, White, and Royal Blue are more similar than they really are. Boyfriend Material is a fully fleshed-out story. Oliver is the put-together one, and I love that character. I loved seeing this robotic character become gently unraveled. I related heavily to Luc, although he’s a white British man. I remember when I was on a plane, and I was reading the sequel, Husband Material , and Luc’s thought process—this fear of being a bad person and whether or not those closest to you believe that you’re a bad person—I could recognize. I’ve had that same thought many times. Reading that scene in that book made me feel less alone and made me think that, actually, people probably wouldn’t prefer to not have me in their lives. That is the true power of messy characters"

"It’s also set in the UK, in London and it was one of our picks for the best romance audiobooks for 2020 . I hadn’t heard anything with this narrator before, Joe Jameson, but he is so good at making you laugh along with the story. He projects the characters so well. It’s a story between two British men who initially are extremely prickly towards each other. It’s a fake dating scheme, which is one of those tropes in romance novels that is so fun, these two people who are like, ‘It’s fine, we’ll just pretend we’re dating for this other reason.’ Of course, they won’t be able to resist each other. Luc is the main character and he is an estranged son of an aging rock star. He keeps winding up in tabloids and that’s affecting his work for the nonprofit he works for. They’re saying, ‘you need to be taken more seriously.’ So he winds up asking Oliver, who is a friend of a friend and a London barrister, who’s very proper, to pose as his boyfriend because he’s someone who is very well respected. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter In the audiobook, you get to hear all the accents of the main characters. There’s also Luc’s Welsh co-worker and his French mother. Joe Jameson did a great job moving between all of those. It’s a really fun listen. There’s a trend with a lot of these books that they’re both funny and sweet and there’s a depth to them, too. Both of the main characters are feeling very vulnerable due to past relationships and Luke’s exposure in the tabloids has affected the way he relates to the world a lot. But it’s also just so funny."