The Espressologist

Jane Turner is an Espressologist. She studies the type of people that order certain drinks and matches them with a person that would best compliment them. She’s been secretly working on this project for a while, matching a couple here or there when she sees a strong match. She doesn’t take school seriously and often skips school in order to get more hours of work at Wired Joe’s. She matches a boy from her class, Cam, with her best friend, Em, to help Em get over a bad break up with her long term boyfriend. One day, she is promoted to assistant manager when her best friend turns down the position. Her Espressology is found out by her moody manager and she is suddenly the feature for the month. Will she be able to keep her manager happy and make matches on command to keep sales up? Why does the match she made with Em and Cam bother her so much?

This book was a bit of cute fluff. It was like watching a middle grade chick flick: not spectacular, but not horrible. The plot was a little like a rip-off of Jane Austen’s Emma, but not done as well as Clueless. I liked the story and the ending. The romance aspect between Cam and Jane was well developed and enjoyable to read. There were some things that bothered me. Jane’s problems with school were only addressed in the first half of the book. I would have liked it to be a little more realistic and she had to face the fact that she neglected school and got bad grades or had to repeat the classes or just leave this part out altogether. I also felt that the Espressology led her to be incredibly shallow and judge people by their looks and what they drank only without seeing how the people really were. This aspect was also not addressed. The characters beyond Em, Jane, and Cam were just typical, flat stock characters that don’t develop, like the mean girl, the brainless jock, and the unreasonable boss.

If you’re looking for a cute, fast read without much depth, I would recommend this to you. It suited my mood when I read it as the first book I read on my summer vacation.

My rating: 3/5 fishmuffins