The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight: Review

Title: The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight

Author: Jennifer E. Smith

Release Date: January 2012

Published By: Little Brown

Pages: 236

Goodreads Rating: 3.65 stars

Review: It should have been the worst day of Hadley's life. After all, she just missed her flight to her father's second wedding to a woman she's never met, and now she's stuck at the airport. But someone else is with her: Oliver, a cute and funny British boy who she ran into in the waiting area. A long night flight on the plane brings them together, but they lose each other in the chaos of the landing. Can they find each other again... and will anything come of it?

As the title clearly indicates, THE STATISTICAL PROBABILITY OF LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT is unabashedly a love story, so of course one of the key things to evaluate in a review of this novel is, well, the romance. And yes, the romance was pretty cute. I enjoyed reading about Hadley getting closer and closer to Oliver as they fell in love through their troubled lives, and even though Oliver wasn't so fantastic as to make me wish I was Hadley or anything like that, the romance was perfectly satisfactory.

But an aspect I was not so keen on in this book was how cliché it ended up being. I mean, of course, the summary makes it fairly obvious that this book will not be breaking any new ground and generally I'm okay with that as long as I can lose myself in the novel enough to see past the predictable plot. Yet while I didn't by any means dislike the book, there just wasn't enough to hook me nor was there enough originality to really impress me.

I had hoped that since there were some serious sides to this story, the ending would make up for it, but unfortunately this was not the case. I found the ending to be just too much on the sappy side for my tastes, with everyone ending up all cute and happy and satisfied in disproportionate amounts to their struggles, and it was more or less what I had known was coming.

This review has been relatively negative and I want to stress that I did like reading this book, and it wasn't bad to decompress with. I just wish that I had been able to bury myself more into the story and that the cliché parts of the novel weren't so glaring for me. The romance wasn't bad at all, and I did like that Hadley and Oliver were fairly well-developed characters. All in all, I'd recommend THE STATISTICAL PROBABILITY OF LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT to anyone who wants a thoughtful but somewhat fluffy novel with a cute romance.