The Right Swipe by Alisha Rai

In my bid to do two things in 2021, read more romance books, and work on reading all the books i’ve been gifted in the past, i picked up my copy of The Right Swipe by Alisha Rai in January!

Romance is a genre that i generally always enjoy. I never find big issues with plots i dislike, and i like being along for the ride no matter how that turns out. But it’s one of my least read genres. Once it became a lot more popular again a couple of years ago, i expressed a lot of interest in reading some more romance novels. Sophie, blog partner and my best friend took note of this, and ended up buying me The Right Swipe for my birthday last year.

It took until now for me to feel like i want to read it, and i’m ready to pick up something that relaxed. The Right Swipe was not the storyline i was expecting. Rival dating apps happen to be thrown together in a mix of events, which obviously lead to some romance (we can accept some cliche and this is one of them). It was a lot more business orientated than i expected it to be, which i very much enjoyed. The entire basis of Rhi being a young woman taking over the online dating world felt very empowering and honestly i felt a little proud to be reading about her. She definitely had some major flaws as a character, but i respected her a lot.

The trope of useless at dating man came in to this a lot, which i can’t say i enjoyed or didn’t. I found it very ‘meh.’ The main point i couldn’t get along with is that i just didn’t see the romance as a romance. I didn’t see the connection or the interest the characters had in each other. Which is obviously a huge part of the story. Whereas i liked reading about these characters, i couldn’t imagine them as real life people falling in love. There are a couple of other cringy moments in The Right Swipe that made my face screw up a little, however these are easy to look past if you want a light hearted read.

One thing i noticed is that to me, the plot and events read a lot like FanFiction. It was very cliche and overly dramatic. Which isn’t bad, but i know won’t be for everyone. It was great for a little bit of escapism for me at the moment.

I really did enjoy the pacing of this novel. It was fast, understandable and punchy. However that mixed sometimes with the aspect of it being a little too fast. Often you’d change scenes and not realise, skipping an entire aspect of the plot that would have fit perfectly inbetween. It sometimes threw me off reading and distracted me whilst i figured out what was happening.

I definitely am excited to get to some more romance novels in the near future, and i definitely have some that have been gifted to me recently to keep on track with my 2021 goal. I’m not sure that Alisha Rai’s writing is for me, so unless i see some incredibly reviews come from one of her upcoming novels, this might have satisfied the need i had for now.