July 2011

“Fast approaching her 30th birthday and finding herself not married, not dating, and without even a prospect or a house full of cats, Renee Greene, the heroine of Click: An Online Love Story, reluctantly joins her best guy pal on a journey to find love online in Los Angeles. The story unfolds through a series of emails between Renee and her best friends (anal-compulsive Mark, the overly-judgmental Ashley and the over-sexed Shelley) as well as the gentlemen suitors she meets online. From the guy who starts every story with “My buddies and I were out drinking one night,” to the egotistical “B” celebrity looking for someone to stroke his ego, Renee endures her share of hilarious and heinous cyber dates. Fraught with BCC’s, FWD’s and inadvertent Reply to All’s, readers will root for Renee to “click” with the right man.”

‘Click: An On-line Love Story’ follows New Yorker Renee Greene’s experiences when she’s talked into joining a dating website by her good friend Mark. During the next few months Renee meets a wonderful assortment of nutcases, rock stars and swines, but will she eventually find her happy ending?

The tale is told completely in the form of emails, either between Renee and her friends or between Renee and the men interested in her on the dating site she joins. The emails were generally kept short and chatty, which is of course the nature of on-line communication, but this meant that the story’s flow was quite broken and the continuous emails did feel a little repetitive. A nice touch might have been to add the profiles of the men emailing Renee from the dating site – I’m sure they would have been very funny and it perhaps would have broken up the uniformity of the emails a little.

It’s not the first time a book has been written using some form of correspondence, be it letters, diary entries or emails, but in this case I didn’t think it was particularly effective. The whole feel was a little too jumpy for my liking, and after a while I found it a touch annoying that every few lines I had to check the headings of each email to find out who was writing to whom.

Becker portrays the characters well during their email conversations, although the little hints that are dropped about past relationships and why Renee isn’t very self-confident just weren’t enough for me: I wanted more detail!

I approved of Renee as a protagonist, but I would have liked to have seen more of Mark, a character who seemed far more interesting than either sex-obsessed Shelley or prudish Ashley. Why is Mark so cautious about everything, and how did he become friends with these women, who’re all so different to him? Having answers to these sort of questions would have made Mark a more rounded character for me.

Renee’s dating adventures were certainly very amusing, however I wanted to get more of a feel for the rest of her life. I was left a bit frustrated that this funny, intelligent character was obsessing about her love life when she has so much more that she could be focussing on: she has hardly any social life, doesn’t see her family and spent her working day emailing her friends about her latest disastrous date – not the sort of feisty, independent female that I’m used to reading about nowadays. She was however, a very loyal and fantastic friend, and I found that I was really rooting for her to find a man who deserved her.

‘Click: An Online Love Story’ is a very easy read with some entertaining moments and a lovable lead character. It was effortless to get into but sadly a little too light for my tastes; I wanted to know more about the protagonists’ lives and histories, and in particular why Renee was so lacking in self-confidence, something which might have explained a lot of her behaviour during the book. Becker has a talent for writing humour, and I’m sure that this very modern love story will appeal to many readers. I only hope that the research for this book didn’t entail too many of her own dating disasters.

2 and a half stars