Living Your Best Life: The perfect feel-good romance from Maxine Morrey

Bee and Luca have been best friends since Infants School when he puller her pigtail then held her hand to stop her crying. Fast forward twenty-something years and Luca is a handsome, highly successful businessman, with a amazing home, who dates models while Bee is stuck in a job she hates, underpaid, undervalued, and living in a tiny flat. Yet they are still best friends. Bee's friends love her just as she is (but they want to change her) but they are sad that she seems happy to be single for the rest of her life, so when Luca announces that he wants to find 'The One' to spend the rest of his life with, their friends challenge them to both join a dating website. Bee and Luca have a bet, she that the website is a waste of time, and he that one of them will find love through the site by Christmas. I think it is fairly obvious to anyone who has read a romance that Bee and Luca are made for each other, and that Luca is in love with Bee, but because of the (perceived) disparity in their looks Bee has never thought of him like that. Part of Bee's lack of self-esteem comes from her parents who were totally absorbed in each other to the exclusion of everyone else, it also comes from not having a degree because she had to care for her mother after her father's sudden death - hence why she stays working for a company she hates. Predictably most of Bees dates are a disaster, but they do start to give her confidence to change things in her life, starting small and moving upwards. All of that I really liked. What brought this down from a four star review for me was a pet peeve in this type of book. (view spoiler) Luca came across as a sanctimonious mansplainer who spent a lot of time telling Bee what her problem was - it's interesting that authors think this is okay from the hero but it's a red flag in every other relationship. Overall, an enjoyable, if rather formulaic and predictable, friends-to-lovers romance let down by the hero's behaviour for me. I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.