The Summer Job: Lizzy Dent

We meet again!

As I’m in a lull between fantasy novels, I figured it was a good time for me to read one of my “fluffer” books, so here we go :)

Brief Synopsis:

Birdy’s life is a veritable mess. She’s never really been able to hold down a steady job, doesn’t even know what her passion in life is, has a poor excuse for a ‘boyfriend’, and stopped speaking to her parents a while back. In fact, the only constant in her life is her best friend, Heather. Which is why it’s even crazier that Birdy goes behind Heather’s back and takes a job as a sommelier, pretending to BE Heather, in the Scottish Highlands for the summer.

Heather had ditched out on the opportunity even though she had a great passion for all things wine (she inherited it from her father) to run away with Cristian, a man that Heather is pretty much nothing but a side piece for. Birdy doesn’t have much time for love and thinks it’s mostly a waste of time, but Heather is the exact opposite and keeps hoping for her happily ever after, falling in with the worst kind of men over and over again.

Birdy sees this as her opportunity to enjoy a summer away from their little flat (which Heather is renting out while she’s away anyway). The way Heather explained the job, it’s in a dinky little hotel. Should be easy enough to fake her way through a summer of recommending wine to a few tourists, right?

Wrong-o. When she gets there, she finds out that the state of the hotel was grossly underestimated, as a man named Russell recently swooped in, purchased it all and started making really swanky upgrades to the whole thing. Almost right away, Birdy realizes how badly she’s messed up. Especially when she begins to bond with some of the people, including Bill, who maybe drinks too much, and the quiet but extremely handsome James.

She begins to try and make her way through the wine list, determined to get through the summer unscathed and with Heather’s reputation intact. When James asks her out not long into the summer, she knows it’s a huge mistake. He thinks that she’s someone else entirely! But she just can’t resist saying yes to a harmless morning fishing trip.

The fishing trip is a modest success (or I guess just not a total disaster) though she tells James that she really shouldn’t get involved with him as she’s not sure if she’s still seeing Tim or not, who’s a total douche anyway. When she begins to become more confident with the wine list, Birdy is more convinced than ever that she can get through this summer without it being the biggest mistake that she’s ever made, hurting way more than just herself in the process.

However, when cooking lessons with James just make her grow even closer to him, she realizes that resisting him was probably futile in the first place. They have one epic night that just ends up making everything worse when questions start getting a little too close to the truth and Birdy ends up doing what she does best and pushing him away before her jig is up.

After a famous critic leaves a harsh review on everyone, Birdy starts to see that her time as Heather is very quickly drawing to a close, but she has a plan: she’s going to help with the yearly wine night event and then disappear with some excuse.

The fun isn’t over yet, though. A worse diversion shows up in the form of Tim, though Birdy had explicitly told him not to come, with his best friend in tow. The two of them get completely wasted and make total fools of themselves, and Birdy is left picking up the pieces.

The summer finally draws to a close and Birdy has made it to the final, big event of the year before she’s ready to duck out. To her surprise, Bill reveals that he’s known that she wasn’t Heather all along, but begs her to keep going because his alcoholism will come to the light even more obviously when he has to tell everyone that he slept through Heather’s Skype interview.

Birdy agrees, and is amazed when the evening is actually going exactly the way that she wanted it to go, though she’s still so sad to be leaving things with James how they are. The night takes a turn when Heather herself turns up unannounced and Birdy has absolutely no choice left but to come clean.

What’s even worse is when she finds out that Heather had an even deeper, and much more personal, reason for running away from the job and the people there in particular. Heather stays at the hotel and Birdy is left wandering by herself for a few days before Heather finally has some grace on her and agrees that they can talk things through.

A handful of months go by and Heather is back at the hotel, as the actual sommelier, and Birdy has been staying in Heather’s flat for the time being. She’s ready to go back to the hotel that she found she loved way more than she expected and apologize to everyone, possibly start fresh? When James himself shows up on her doorstep.

My Rating:

5/10. It was a fun fluffer read, but things were kind of scattered all over the place for me and the characters were surface, to me. I couldn’t get as into them as I wanted to and as a result, I wasn’t as invested in the story as I really wanted to be.

Favorite Quote(s):

“I don’t speak. I don’t say sorry again. I’ve worn the word out so much it feels threadbare on my lips.”

A book I read with similar vibes:

I was thinking a lot about Much Ado About You when I first started this book, but really toward the end.

Check out my Goodreads (Traci Bishop) and/or my Storygraph (bookishmamabish) to see what I’m currently reading and to see a good chunk of the books I have already read. My Instagram can be found on the home page and I will share whenever a new post is up as well!

Until next time <3