Eye Candy

Eye Candy fits comfortably into Jessica Lemmon’s catalogue of contemporary romance, where the titles often signal the trope before the cover art has a chance. Lemmon has built a steady audience over more than thirty novels by writing the kind of book her readers can finish in a weekend and put down feeling good. Her heroines tend to be women with their own careers and lives, dealing with one specific situation that has knocked them slightly off balance. Her heroes are usually competent men with one specific blind spot the heroine is going to expose.

The eye candy of the title points to the surface attraction subgenre, where the chemistry is immediate and the work of the novel is figuring out what is underneath the obvious. Lemmon handles this kind of setup well because she takes the time to make her characters’ resistance to each other believable. They have reasons to keep their distance, and the attraction has to overcome those reasons through actual connection rather than just heat.

Lemmon’s prose is light and quick. She does not write the longest books in the genre and her chapters end with hooks. The dialogue carries most of the romantic chemistry, and her couples talk to each other like adults rather than miscommunicate their way through three quarters of the book. The heat level stays warm without going extreme, which suits the kind of feel good rom com territory she has settled into.

Readers who enjoy Lauren Layne, Christina Lauren, Helena Hunting, or Tessa Bailey will find familiar pleasure in Lemmon’s work. Her standalones can be read in any order, and Eye Candy is a comfortable, well crafted entry into her catalogue. For new readers looking for an easy weekend read, this is a fine place to start.