Love Means All Debts Are Off: 'I Owe You One' by Sophie Kinsella Book Review

Ah, the romance novel. If I had to choose two genres to read exclusively for the rest of my life, romance novels would make the cut. They give me a chance to escape into somebody else's relationship and shamelessly let out a series of awwws every few chapters.

I geared up for this emotional rollercoaster. I was ready for the meet-cute, the blossoming relationship, the conflict that could've been avoided if the main characters had simply said that thing, and finally, the resolution and happily ever after.

I was ready to read I Owe You One by Sophie Kinsella cover to cover. And I did.

Boy, was I disappointed.

Okay, maybe disappointed doesn't quite reflect how I felt. I was unsatisfied but also dissatisfied. According to the back cover of the book, Jenny Colgan described it as "a shot of pure joy!" I wondered why I didn't feel that way.

I couldn’t put my finger on why I didn’t like the book besides the fact that the resolution felt rushed.

For context, Fixie (real name Fawn) is a hard-working young lady who is always trying to fix everything and constantly puts the needs of her family before her own. She lives by her late father's motto: "Family first." Fixie helps her mother run the store left behind by her father while her older siblings simply do anything but. The eldest, Jake, is a businessman who is always lavishly entertaining clients and it seems he is the most successful. He nearly has an MBA. Nicole is beautiful but I remember nothing else about her character except that she's married and is "drifty and vague."

Being the kind-hearted person that she is (enter handsome stranger), Fixie agrees to watch a stranger's laptop while in a coffee shop and ends up saving it from destruction. Sebastian, our stranger, is so grateful to her that he offers to repay Fixie but she declines. Seb insists and hands her his contact information and an IOU he's scribbled onto a coffee sleeve. Fixie leaves with no intention of ever contacting this man.

Now, here is where it gets messy. Fixie's childhood crush, Ryan, returns from Hollywood and comes back into her life. Because she envisions a life where she and Ryan are finally together, she claims the IOU and asks Sebastian to give Ryan a job. This starts up a string of IOUs between the pair.

Somewhere in all this, Fixie's mother falls ill and leaves the shop in the hands of the three siblings. This is challenging as they each have very different ideas for the shop but only Fixie has any real experience working there. That doesn't stop her siblings from making her feel incompetent, overriding her decisions and almost ruining the business. Subsequently, Fixie and Sebastian have a spat which causes both of them to examine their lives and deal with their demons.

The book ends on a happy note but I don't want to give away the whole story.

I didn't enjoy the pacing of the story so I thought, there must be something I like. Nope. I disliked all the characters because they annoyed me. I hadn’t even reconciled with the main character and I felt like I at least had to like her otherwise what was the point of the story? I didn't even enjoy the romance!

• Nicole is avoiding her husband;

• Ryan is a disgusting person and his and Fixie's "romance" is situational;

• we don't know anything about Sebastian and Briony's romance;

• Hannah and Tim love each other but that's all we know because this isn't about them; and

• Sebastian and Fixie's relationship is quickly brushed over like it's Janet Jackson's Interlude: Let's Dance.

At least Leila had nothing but unwavering love and support for Jake.

I stopped focusing on the romance and started focusing on the love. As I set out to explain the reasons I disliked this romance novel, I ended up shifting my attention to something else entirely - debt.

Throughout the book, from Sebastian's IOU to Jake's literal debt crisis, debt is a recurring theme. In an emotionally fuelled conversation between Sebastian and Fixie, she tells him that love isn't "about what you can do for each other." It is in this scene that she also says, "Love means all debts are off." This is my favourite part because Fixie is calling out this pattern of owing each other in her relationship with Sebastian but also unknowingly calling herself out. In all her relationships, Fixie feels like she owes it to everyone to go above and beyond even when she should be putting her needs first. That's Fixie's debt.

The blurb describes this as a story of empowerment. Sebastian tells Fixie she's a ninja and suddenly she's a different, more confident person. It's like there's a "growth" switch that Sebastian just flips; she only gets a sentence. Suddenly, Fixie can stand up to everyone because she perceives herself as a "ninja" and not as everybody's caretaker.

Nicole and Fixie don't have much of a relationship because they're very different people. Nicole doesn't seem to care about much else but herself whereas Fixie is preoccupied with helping her mother and keeping the family together. Nicole lives to have everything done for her and to tell Fixie that she doesn't understand anything. There are times in the novel that I wonder if Nicole even likes Fixie.

Her brother, Jake, is a flat-out terrible person. He's selfish, obnoxious and condescending. He treats Fixie terribly and never misses an opportunity to belittle her. So it's hard to believe the absolute transformation that he does at the end of the story. The writer does an amazing job of building up this monstrosity of a character and now we're just supposed to love him?

Well, that's what the tagline on the book's cover (that my title is a rip-off of) means. And I guess that was the book's purpose all along; to witness the character development of Fixie and her siblings. We were supposed to witness Fixie learning to love herself with all debts off.

A lot of time was spent building up the negative traits of her siblings and drawing us into Fixie's shortfalls. When the time to rectify all of this comes, we only have five out of twenty-seven chapters in which Fixie must finally stand up for herself, she and Sebastian must break up and make up, she must save the business, and she must also build a healthy relationship with her siblings. And that's only what's going on in Fixie's life; her siblings are also dealing with some heavy stuff that they only resolve in these five chapters. It all felt very I-forgot-to-remove-the-chicken-from-the-freezer-esque.

Do I think this book was badly written? No, I don't. Did I enjoy this book? Unfortunately not.