Work in Progress by Kat Mackenzie

RomanceContemporary

Feb 27

Written By taylor shepeard

Title: Work in Progress

Author: Kat Mackenmzie

Publication Date: January 14, 2025

Audience: Adult

Genre: Romance

Sub-Genre: Contemporary

POV: Single

Series: Standalone

Format: Audiobook

—Narrator(s): Angela Dawe

3.25 ⭐ | 1🌶️

Pros:
✨Audiobook Narration
✨Secondary Characters
✨Fun Concept

Cons:
✨Alice Cooper (Protagonist)
✨Underdeveloped / Flat Characters
✨Miscommunication Trope
✨Contrived Conflict
✨Telling instead of Showing

Synopsis

A warm, sexy, laugh-out-loud rom-com about a woman who, desperate for a fresh start, books a literary bus tour across the UK that consists of a lively group of elderly ladies plus one infuriatingly handsome Scottish driver.

… Falling in Love was not on her to-do list.
The last six months of Alice Cooper's life have been, in her own words, "a poop tornado." So, in a desperate attempt to pull herself out of the emotional quicksand threatening to swallow her whole, she books a three-week bus tour of literary and historical British sites.
Alice arrives in Edinburgh after a hellish trip involving multiple layovers, crushed luggage, and an epic row with an insolent Scotsman at the lost baggage counter. After a mad dash to catch the tour bus, she discovers that instead of globe-trotting thirtysomethings, the bus is full of cheerful octogenarians, and that the aforementioned arrogant Scot is the bus driver. Alice is sure he will make the nonrefundable trip a misery.
He is arrogant and rude. He also has beautiful blue eyes and dotes on his elderly charges. The ladies are vivacious and full of stories. The historical sites are entrancing. The book club chat is on fire. And, it's possible that Alice's battered heart is starting to beat again.

*Blurb taken from The StoryGraph

Review

This review may contain spoilers.

Oof. This was problematic. I’m going to start this out with the things I really enjoyed about the novel. (Basically, all the elements that had nothing to do with the FMC.)

The concept here was fun. A literary tour through the UK led by a sassy, attractive Scottish-man and accompanied by a gaggle of old ladies. The secondary cast was hilarious (if surface level) and made for a fun atmosphere. Robbie, the MMC and love-interest, was genuine and kind and bursting with character. I adored him, and wish we had gotten more emotional intimacy beyond the back-and-forth banter between him and Alice. The inclusion of UK culture (as someone from the United States) was interesting, and I enjoyed the pockets of history as the group visited different locations.

Unfortunately, our FMC, Alice Cooper, was wholly unlikeable. She was outright mean to Robbie. And, yes, this did lead to some bits of banter that had me cackling, but I’d say it’s a 60/40 mean-to-funny ratio. I didn’t understand where her hostility came from. They had a bad first encounter, but it felt disproportionate to her barbs.

The entire conflict between Alice and Robbie hinges on the classic, and hated, miscommunication trope. And this is where I would have DNF’d if I didn’t need to finish this for a reading prompt. Alice overhears Robbie on a phone call, and based on the conversation, she thinks he has a girlfriend. What should have happened at that point, especially based on Alice’s backstory of being cheated on by her fiancé—the inciting incident for her spontaneous trip to the UK—is that she should have called him out for kissing her and flirting with her. A simple: “It’s inappropriate to hit on me when you have a girlfriend”.

Except, this didn’t happen. She just blubbered around, told him to keep his distance without any explanation, then switched tune and said they should be friends, all while still fantasizing about him even as he continued to low-key flirt with her.

Alice is confrontational to a fault. It made no sense that she didn’t immediately rebut his advances and spit fire at him for being a cheater.

Which leaves me with two huge issues:

This whole miscommunication could have been resolved in a single sentence.
Alice had skewed morals and kept ogling a man who she 100% believed had a girlfriend, which goes against the basic logic of her character personality and development.

When Alice finally does realize that the woman Robbie spoke to was his mom, and that he never had a girlfriend, she’s upset he didn’t pursue her harder. Excuse me, girlie, are you saying that you’re upset he … respected your boundaries? Listened to you and agreed to do what would make you feel more comfortable?

Baffled.

She acted more like a high school teen throwing a nonstop temper tantrum than she did a 30-year-old woman.

There were other faults. Telling instead of showing. Lack of character development. An FMC and MMC that felt flat. Irrelevant plot points. Etc. But those paled in comparison to how much I loathed Alice. I spite-read this to fulfill my reading prompt.

And what stinks is that there were pieces of the book I truly enjoyed. If Alice Cooper had been cut from this story, it would have been enjoyable. Give me more Robbie and his band of geriatric ladies trooping across the UK. That would have been 100 times better than this.

I listened to the audiobook, and Angela Dawe made this as bearable as she could. Great voice distinction between characters, including juggling the accents!