Review: Open House

Open House by Ruby Lang
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ruby Lang's "Open House" was a short, sweet, cute, and funny story. While it is technically the second book in Ms. Lang's Uptown series, it is a complete standalone, and it is not necessary to have read the first book to understand the events of this one.

I read and (mostly) enjoyed the first book in this series ("Playing House"), but I actually liked this one better because the characters seemed to be better developed, and the growth of the romantic relationship between main characters Magda and Tyson felt more natural to me. I especially liked Magda and found it easy to understand how her childhood and family situation drove her need to succeed in her real estate career, which was the main source of conflict in her burgeoning relationship with Tyson. Magda was a lot smarter and stronger than her mother and sisters gave her credit for, and I appreciated that she made the effort to stand up to them and demand to be treated like an adult even though it was difficult for her.

I found it tougher to relate to Tyson, especially at first, because I didn't feel like I got to know him as well as I did Magda. His mother's death clearly had a major impact on him, but I kept expecting there to be more to his story, like a bad breakup. At any rate, a number of the things he did and said seemed to come out of left field when they happened, even though most of them were explained later. An example is when Ty quit his job, which didn't make a lot of sense to me at the time because he had barely even mentioned his work up to that point, and I certainly never got the impression that he was unhappy there. (His decision to quit was explained later in the story, and it was a reasonable explanation, but still, I was frustrated at the time because there was no clear setup for it.)

Despite that (relatively minor) frustration, Magda and Tyson were both likeable lead characters, and the secondary characters were pretty great as well, especially Tyson's sister Jenny and Magda's Uncle Byron. Jenny had a great sense of humor (her joking description of the community garden as a "vegetable cartel" made me laugh out loud), and I could see her being featured in a future story of her own. (Uncle Byron's joke about the "socialist vegetables" was also pretty funny. There were some great one-liners in this book.)

Overall, I enjoyed this story, thought it was generally well-written, and would recommend it. I plan to pick up the next book in the series.

*ARC provided by the publisher via NetGalley. All opinions expressed are my own.

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