I always love a good fluffy romance about geeks and this one hooked me. Cam, an IT professor, is a great male lead and I adored him as the love interest. I liked him quite a bit more than the female love interest, but she was interesting enough to keep me reading. The premise of attempting to follow 1950s dating advice was unique and hilarious.

I found the pacing of this book to be particularly irritating. The two leads have been best friends for years. The male lead particularly has been in love with the female love interest for a very long time. Most of the conflict in the story is due to miscommunication, but it persists throughout the entire book. I don't mind some minor miscommunication in stories like this as long as it doesn't last the entire length of the story. People in real life have trouble communicating all the time even in already established relationships. I don't think that is unrealistic. In this story in particular I just found it irritating. There are no sex scenes in the entire book and the couple essentially doesn't get together until the very end. I think I just felt that the level of conflict the couple had was not balanced out by the amount of time we spent with them as a couple. The lack of sex scenes isn't what bothered me, it was just the lack of payoff after all that grueling pining from both love interests. I might give this author another try in the future, but so far I was disappointed. 

Melanie "Mel" Hirsch has always dreamed of having a successful writing career, but for now, she works as a writing tutor for a local university. When she comes across an advice article from the 1950s on how to find a husband and starts to wonder if any of the suggestions would work in the modern world, she decides to test the theory and use the results of her experiments as the basis for her first book. If she's lucky, maybe she'll meet a nice guy along the way, too. Unfortunately, her friend and co-worker, Cameron Whitacre, an adjunct computer science professor and director of IT at the university where Mel works, isn't too keen on the idea. He claims that he's concerned about Mel's safety since she'll be meeting a number of strange men while conducting her experiments, but the truth is that he's secretly been in love with her ever since they met five years ago and has been waiting for her to notice him ever since. Mel has a bit of a crush on Cameron too, but won't let herself act on it because she's afraid of messing up their friendship. Besides, she doesn't believe that he returns her romantic feelings; if he did, wouldn't he have made a move at some point in all the years they've known each other? The more involved Mel gets with her "research," the more frustrated Cameron becomes. Will he gather the courage to confess his true feelings before it's too late?
 
I really enjoyed the unique premise of this story as well as Mel's "mancounters," which were generally pretty funny. Most of the advice she followed from the article was terrible, even for the 1950s! I also enjoyed the humorous group texts between Mel, Cameron, and their mutual friend Ivy. However, I was a bit frustrated by Cameron and Mel's prolonged unwillingness to talk to each other about their feelings, both because it was so obvious how they felt about each other and because they both seemed stuck, unable to move forward with their lives as long as things between them remained unresolved. When the conversation finally happened, it was very late in the story, so we didn't get to see much of them as a couple before the book ended.
 
Overall, "Book Smart" was a cute, funny story that I recommend for all fans of sweet contemporary romance and romantic comedy. It's an excellent debut for author Amanda Pennington, and I will certainly be watching to see what she writes next.
 
*Review copy provided by Smartypants Romance. All opinions expressed are my own. 

Not to be ranty but like….I’m so sick of rom coms where the main female characters are in the arts and the main male characters are in STEM. I’m so bored of that narrative like are we done is it over…..when Ivy said she didn’t know what an algorithm was I wanted to pass out. When Mel tried to get a man by “looking intellectual” outside the engineering building, come on. It’s insulting—and makes the feminist tones of the book hollow with no follow through. Just once can we get a contemporary book with a woman in STEM and a man in the arts? STEM isn’t inherently masculine, and the arts are not inherently feminine. As a woman in STEM myself it’s this exact line of thinking that impacts my day to day life. 

This is not to bash women who choose not to be in STEM, that is their choice. I just wish that there were more female book characters like me.