When Katie Met Cassidy by Camille Perri

When Katie Met Cassidy by Camille Perri
Release Date - June 19, 2018
Publisher Website - Penguin Random House Canada

Publisher Social Media - Twitter
Pages -  272 pages
My Rating - 3/5
**received from the publisher for an honest review**

Here is the Goodreads synopsis

From the acclaimed author of The Assistants comes another gutsy book about the importance of women taking the reins—except this time, when it comes to finding sexuality, pleasure, and love sometimes where you least expect it.

Katie Daniels is a perfection-seeking 28-year-old lawyer living the New York dream. She’s engaged to charming art curator Paul Michael, has successfully made her way up the ladder at a multinational law firm and has a hold on apartments in Soho and the West Village. Suffice it to say, she has come a long way from her Kentucky upbringing.

But the rug is swept from under Katie when she is suddenly dumped by her fiance, Paul Michael, leaving her devastated and completely lost. On a whim, she agrees to have a drink with Cassidy Price-a self-assured, sexually promiscuous woman she meets at work. The two form a newfound friendship, which soon brings into question everything Katie thought she knew about sex—and love.

When Katie Met Cassidy is a romantic comedy that explores how, as a culture, while we may have come a long way in terms of gender equality, a woman’s capacity for an entitlement to sexual pleasure still remain entirely taboo. This novel tackles the question: Why, when it comes to female sexuality, are so few women figuring out what they want and then going out and doing it? 

I went into When Katie Met Cassidy expecting a lot of things. I expected it to be a romance. For it to have a light and fluffy tone. I expected a relationship that featured two female characters. I got a lot of those things within this book. I also got a novel that wasn't quite the fun rom-com I was expecting even though it certainly had elements of that within it. It felt like, for me, that this was a book ultimately trying to be multiple things but not committing to either one of them in the end.

The writing within the pages of this novel ensures that it will be a fast read. It's the type of writing that is simple and clean. It means that you'll breeze through it quite easily. This is a plus for romance reads that are meant to be light and fun. You want that tone and atmosphere to be felt in the writing. It means the author is tailoring their style of writing to the genre of book. It works well and makes this book more engaging as a result.

Katie is someone who is just discovering that she is attracted to women. I appreciated that Katie was confused and unsure what this meant. She couldn't label herself because she was still attempting to figure that part out. This element of the story worked for me and I wish her journey had been explored a little more if it was going to be part of the plot. It may be a personal preference but this element was important to the plot so I thought it should have been fleshed out a little more. We see her grappling with big decisions and having to ask herself important questions and I just didn't feel that coming through.

Cassidy's character is dealing with something that everyone deals with at some point  - aging. She is entering the stage in her life where going out to clubs and hooking up with strangers is losing the appeal it once had. She comments that she is 'aging out' of her lifestyle and coming to terms with what the means for her. This shifting focus was also interesting, but I never really felt the full emotional payoff of the journey Cassidy's character takes. It's never explored enough to fully resonate even though the surface level stuff shows promise.

There are some interesting side characters that helped flesh out Cassidy's character a little bit, but this character development was lacking on Katie's end.  Katie is either seen at her place of work, or with Cassidy and her friends. The moments where she is alone in her apartment are used quite nicely to establish who she is, but having relationships outside the main romantic one is, I feel, important. They are both point of view characters and getting to see Katie outside of her relationship with Cassidy would have went a long way. I wish we had gotten to see more of who each the women are outside of the their connection to one another. We get these glimpses but nothing materializes out of them.

When Katie Met Cassidy offers up an enjoyable enough read but I wanted just a little bit more from both the character development and romance. The taste we got was just not quite enough to make it work for me the way I wanted it to. It's a novel that, for me, never quite reaches its potential.