I would like to thank Netgalley and St. Martin's Griffin for the opportunity to read this book.
Unfortunately, this book was not for me. I did not review it.

I was super excited to read this book because it sounded like something I would love, with two of my favorite tropes: single parents and a fake relationship. I was sadly very disappointed by how it was excecuted. I think the worst part was the writing. It was simple and repetitive and it made me want to stop reading constantly. The relationship wasn't one I was invested in, it was toxic and boring. I disliked the hero in particular, he was rude and arrongant. The heroine wasn't that bad and the relationship with her son was probably my favorite part.

Angel the nurse and Caleb the baseball player have a meet-cute, suffer some tribulations, and get their happily ever after. There's no surprise, and there's not meant to be: the point is, how do they get there, and is it a rewarding journey? The pacing and the plot rationale didn't always seem to be on point, and Angel was (understandably) prickly and inconsistent, while Caleb was a bit bland. It's fine. It felt a little underdeveloped, but was an enjoyable read. I'd definitely try another by these authors.

I was very excited to read this book but unfortunately couldn't even get through half of it. It was uninteresting, the characters were unlikable, and I just couldn't sit through it.

Love is a four letter word. It can have you swearing or have you floating on cloud nine. Ether way, if you want to date, those are the chances you have to take. I loved this book to give you insight on one couple’s journey in this complicated thing we call love. Love is the most powerful drug of all. I appreciate this author giving me the opportunity to read her book. I throughly enjoyed it.

This story was well done. I liked the main leads both being people of color and strong opinionated people. I was thinking it’d be a bit happier than it ended up being, it was very dramatic and serious for a lot of the story. But well written and interesting to read.

This is the second book I’ve read from the authors and it’s pretty much the same. Change the jobs of the MCs (from The Wrong Mr. Darcy) and it’s uncanny. Both books even have the same wife/girlfriend association concept going on. There are no likeable characters, the “relationship” of the MCs are so toxic, and the story is over-the-top dramatic.
The synopsis is so misleading; you’d think this was a cute contemporary romance, oh hoh, you’d be in such a great surprise.

This was a new author for me and not your average romance novel. I thought that the story was very interesting and that the characters were well-developed and likable. It is not a chick-lit type of romance. There was lots of drama, but I found it to be very enjoyable. I would read more from this author.

Unfortunately this book was not for me. I tried to read it a couple of times and sadly I just couldn't get into the story. I just couldn't connect with the motives from either of the main characters and I didn't know what I was supposed to be wanting to happen because I didn't like either of them. Thank you for the chance to read this but I will not be reviewing on my blog.

Single mom and nursing student, Angel, is trying her best to do all she can for her son, to better their lives and life situation. While doing her practicum at a local clinic, she has a chance encounter with Caleb "the Duke." He looks familiar but she can't put her finger on why or where she's seen this man before. "The Duke" is kind to her son after he has an asthma attack and she wasn't able to take care of the medical issue at home.
To make ends meet Angel works as a bartender/waitress at an upscale bar but is tired of all the rich people who think they're better than everyone else and treat the staff as objects and not as people.
She's tired of answering to sleazy men, the doctor at the clinic and the manager/owner of the bar. She's surrounded by men trying to keep her down and all she wants to do is make a better life for her son and herself without relying on anyone else but circumstances and situations keep getting in the way and make things difficult for her to get out of.

"The Duke" finds Angel to be interesting and very beautiful, he can't stop thinking about her and every time he sees her he keeps making a fool out of himself and she doesn't want to have anything to do with him.

This book is an up and down roller coaster of them liking each other and someone making the other upset or angry but in the end love might just win out.

For the most part I enjoyed the book but the way it was laid out to read on the Kindle it would be difficult to follow at times. I would recommend this book to anyone that enjoys this genre of books.

I really enjoyed the premise of this book, but the execution was not my style! It was boring, cookie-cutter dialogue that I wasn't invested in. I found myself skimming through "big" moments. I liked the characters, but I didn't really understand why I should root for them. I would recommend this book to someone who already loves romance, and wants something light to read between heavier reads. If I passed this on to someone who wasn't convinced about this genre, I think they might be bored.

This book was a sad excuse for contemporary romance. I can usually forgive these types of stories for cheesy plotlines and corny writing, but the main characters were just so unlikeable.

I had SO many conflicting feelings when reading this book. I felt like the idea of this story was a good one but it’s execution just felt forced when talking about Hispanic and African American cultures & at times it was downright cringey. Both main characters were all sorts of toxic and mest up, they contradicted themselves on multiple occasions and really, their own redeeming quality was in the form of the little boy Jose. This book gave off the vibe of trying way too hard to emulate a contemporary romance and it really just went off the wayside on more than one occasion. Thank you Netgalley for the opportunity to read this one for an honest review because while I was entertained for a couple hours, I could not get passed all the wrong things going on in this book.

This book was not what I was expecting. I saw the cover and fell in love. Don't let it fool you.

Angela is a single mom and doing the best she can. She is in the process of finishing her nursing degree as well as working as a bartender, needless tosay she is always busy. In comes Duke, a pitcher for the Yankees. Angela doesn't know who he is, all she knows is that he needs her help. He needs Angela to pretend that they are dating so that he can use her as an excuse to be going to the clinic that she works at.. The question is with all the drama a single mom has in their life does she really need to add the drama of pretending to be someones girlfriend?

This book wasn't the greatest, but it held my attention long enough for me to finish it. It tends to repeat itself alot it had some scenes in it that you will be like this is SO fiction. But at the end of the day I enjoyed the book enough to finish it.

Not sure I would recommend this book to my friends. If they asked I would tell them that I finished it. They know if I don't finish a book not to bother getting it.

I think this book would work well for another reader but for me, it didn't hit the right spot and I wasn't as into it as I'd hoped to be. The characters seemed interesting, but it just wasn't the right book at the right time for me. The cover is really darling though.

A fun romance featuring a strong female lead named Angel Gomez who is taking care of her son and completing her nursing degree. She meets Duke who is a baseball player who needs to improve his reputation and sees Angel as a way to do that. I would recommend to readers who enjoy authors like Christina Lauren and Jasmine Guillory.

Cute book, but nothing spectacular. Predictable plot (nothing I am against) but I have to have something to draw me to this book, these characters and I didn't find that special something with this.

This book was so much drama. It was really annoying and I only kept reading it because I received an ARC copy of it for review. I regret finishing it though because it was a waste of time. Every single page was full of drama and I kept rolling my eyes. Nothing good or promising happened in the book to keep me going, and I don’t usually write such negative reviews but I feel that the description and synopsis to this book was extremely misleading. I eventually skimmed to the end to finish it off, and find out what happened, but it was not worth it. I have nothing else to say except that the cover and description are both pretty deceiving.

This book was one for the ages. As much as I wanted to like this book, it was a hot mess. The writing felt off and at times it felt like I was reading two different books. I wanted to really like Angel but she made it so hard with her brash personality. I felt like she needed therapy or anger management to deal with all the stress. Then we have Caleb and there was much to be desired when it came to him as well. I didn’t care for him and felt that he really didn’t redeem himself enough for me as I read. There was one scene at the end but it felt so out of character and forced.I honestly didn’t feel a connection between Caleb and Angel as I read. Then there were side stories that were way over the top and made me cringe. I appreciate the light being shown on children with asthma in the Bronx, I grew up there and developed asthma later on. For that reason alone I will be giving this book three stars.

Before I downloaded The Perfect Date from NetGalley, I headed over to Goodreads to read the reviews. They weren’t good; they were bad. The worse that I’ve every read. I took a chance. I figured The Perfect Date hadn’t hit its target audience, reviewers familiar with Evelyn Lozada. Therefore, they went into the book with expectations different from people familiar with the reality star and her on-screen persona would have.

They were right. I was wrong.

One of the most common criticisms on Goodreads is that the heroine and hero are unlikeable. I didn’t find Angel and Duke unlikeable; I found their personalities and life circumstances at odds with the cover illustrate cover and the generic synopsis. Based on the cover and synopsis prepare readers for a light contemporary read. While The Perfect Date is a contemporary, it’s not light. Angel and Duke are going through some things. They are two people raised in New York by poor families that are struggling to not become a statistic or stereotype. Their reality reflects in their personalities, which aren’t the personalities that people expect for two main characters in a light contemporary romance. Instead, The Perfect Date should have been marketed as a gritty sports romance. I think readers searching for a sports romance would have been more forgiving of Angel and Duke’s attitude and accepting of a heroine and a hero who both are rough around the edges.

The Perfect Date features two my favorite tropes, fake dating and hate to love. Duke needs Angel to help him make sure that public and the bigwigs of his major league baseball team believe that he is on the straight and narrow. He needs to keep his image clean to not jeopardize his position as the starting pitcher after a slew of recent scandal. Angel agrees, worried about consequences their association will have on her and her son’s future. The perfectly normal fake dating trope premise. Lozada and Loricnz tainted this trope with way too much drama, instead Angel and Duke learning they have a lot in common and enjoying their fake dates, engaging in “fake” flirtations that eventually leads to real romance there was nothing but drama. Almost all their encounters were Drama City, kind of like everyone favorite “Real Housewives of (insert city/region name here)” reality show which Lozada is an alum. It was almost like they were unable to have normal human interactions with each other without some amount of drama. The drama was over the top and unnecessary.

That leaves the hate to love trope to save this romance.

The Perfect Date failed to deliver on this trope as well. The transition from hate to love was not believable. While there’s a clear sexual attraction between Angel and Duke. There was no romantic chemistry. Especially, the romantic chemistry needed to make a hate to love relationship romance work. There was no sexual tension between the two of them. There were too few causal conversations between them to help them transition from hating each other (or rather Angel hating Duke) to loving each other. Again, The Perfect Date failed to execute the necessary transitional interactions need to make a hate to love trope work. When I finished the last page, I felt that Angel and Duke still didn’t know each other enough to make their romance believable. I never bought into the notion of Angel and Duke falling in love or at the end of them being in love. Angel and Duke ended up being two people attracted to each other but lacking romantic spark.

My rating of The Perfect Date could’ve been higher if the writing hadn’t been bad. Normally, I can excuse symptoms of a first novel (this is Lozada’s second). But this romance didn’t suffer from those symptoms. The writing was just not good. It was almost as if the writers weren’t familiar with the expectations of romance readers so the novel lack a lot of character and plot development that readers are looking forward too. I have high expectation for the writing in romance novels because the level of skill required to keep readers interested in a story where they already know the outcome is high. They have to not only write well developed plots and characters, but the writing has to be good enough that readers are invested in the seeing the main characters achieve their HEA. The writing in The Perfect Date was just meh, so meh that I almost DNF’d it a couple of times because my interest kept weaning.

While The Perfect Date has an interesting premise and pretty cover, I can’t recommend it. The over the top constant drama, lackluster romance, and mediocre writing failed to deliver. Which is unfortunate because it had tropes that I enjoy and characters that deserved an HEA.