Arranged by Catherine McKenzie
May 15, 2012 by William Morrow
Paperback, Pages
Review Copy

Anne is your typical savvy career prone 33 year old woman. She's young, full of life, has great hair and has a weakness for good looking, blue-eyed, dark haired men who always break her heart. Why, when she has the looks, the body, the success and the personality, does she always pick the wrong one, why do they keep leaving her?

Those are the questions Anne asks herself before contemplating a dating service. At her wits end and sick of the dating scene, Anne decides to swallow her pride and go for it. When she actually starts the process with a secret and unknown company, she learns that the agency is in fact not a dating service but arranges marriages for couples in need of a husband or wife. Its totally legit and legal and only assigns willing, consenting adults, to the sum of ten thousand dollars.

At first Anne is floored by the idea but over the course of a few weeks and wringing her hands about the money, decides to go forward with it, I mean her best friend is getting married, her brother Gil and his happy wife are on baby number four and her mom can't understand why she wont just settle down....what could possibly go wrong? She'll either A: find a husband or B: get rejected from the program. So Anne does it with both feet in and undergoes evaluation and tons of tests to match her personality with the perfect man. She has to start rounds of therapy, things that help her see why she picks the men she does and gets to know herself a little better, because when the man is found there is no dating, its a meet and marriage arrangement, the company wants to make sure Anne is prepared and ready.

Anne fumbles her way through the process and everyday that a man isn't found she gets more nervous, in a sense shes ready to leave the awkward dating shenanigans behind her and settle down, but can she really just marry some guy before even going on a date with him? Anne finds out after a few months, when a man named Jack is matched to her and all her dreams are promised to come true. They each travel separately to a resort in Mexico, meet in a room full of other couples, eat dinner privately and you guessed it.....get married.

The therapist {who worked with them both in the beginning} warns the eager couple to take things slow, build a friendship and commit to the level of marriage they both so eagerly wanted. But when the couple rushes things and lets the intensity of their attraction get away from them, things lead to faster than should have scenarios. When the excitement and dangerous thrill of Jack and Anne's choice wears off the two must face reality when back at home. Friends and family must be told, lives must be merged and living together takes on a life of its own. Can the couple make it? Is it a dream come true? Only time will tell and the odds are stacked against them.

I so loved this book, it was brilliantly funny and Anne was a hysterical drama queen who captured my heart in the first chapter, she was so fun, at times calm and admirable and other times flighty and dramatic. Yes the cliche single woman with a great career looking for love arc was the building stones of Arranged, but McKenzie brought such originality to her story with the concept of an extreme dating service arranging marriages that I was able to overlook that. The book is told in three parts, before the marriage, the marriage and the after, my favorite part being of course the after because that's when the seriousness of the story took hold and the real depth of McKenzie's unique characters surfaced. Most of the book had me smiling, laughing out load and saying things like "ohhhh, noooo"...when things were said and done I filed Arranged under recommended summer reads for a blast of good time.


Rating

Arranged is recommended to adult readers and contains: Strong language, drinking and sexuality including sex scenes and dialog.

4/5- Contemporary
Thanks to William Morrow and TLC Book Tours for Review Copy

Catherine McKenzie was born and raised in Montreal, Quebec, where she now practices law. An avid runner and skier, she also sits on various boards and professional organizations, and has taught part-time at the McGill Faculty of Law.