The Statistical Probability Of Love At First Sight by Jennifer E. Smith
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Pages: 224
Publisher: Headline
Published: January 5th, 2012
IBSN: 9780755384020
Who would have guessed that four minutes could change everything?
Imagine if she hadn't forgotten the book. Or if there hadn't been traffic on the expressway. Or if she hadn't fumbled the coins for the toll. What if she'd run just that little bit faster and caught the flight she was supposed to be on. Would it have been something else - the weather over the atlantic or a fault with the plane?
Hadley isn't sure if she believes in destiny or fate but, on what is potentially the worst day of each of their lives, it's the quirks of timing and chance events that mean Hadley meets Oliver...
Set over a 24-hour-period, Hadley and Oliver's story will make you believe that true love finds you when you're least expecting it.
Imagine if she hadn't forgotten the book. Or if there hadn't been traffic on the expressway. Or if she hadn't fumbled the coins for the toll. What if she'd run just that little bit faster and caught the flight she was supposed to be on. Would it have been something else - the weather over the atlantic or a fault with the plane?
Hadley isn't sure if she believes in destiny or fate but, on what is potentially the worst day of each of their lives, it's the quirks of timing and chance events that mean Hadley meets Oliver...
Set over a 24-hour-period, Hadley and Oliver's story will make you believe that true love finds you when you're least expecting it.
Say Hadley had gotten to the airport just four minutes earlier and made her flight. She wouldn't have met Oliver, and may have had the exact miserable experience at her father's wedding that she anticipated. She was lucky. But in another stroke of luck, the two of them are separated after their flight without so much as a last name.
The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight has built up a lot of early buzz as a breezy crossover romance. The quirky mood of the story is matched by its title, though while I love long titles as much as anyone else, the whole time I was bothered by how little correlation there is between statistics and probability and how it just didn't work. But onto points of the book that matter more.
The Statistical Probability is barely 200 pages long, short in a way that reflected the story's span of less than 24 hours. Plain prose suited the simple romantic premise and kept to the point, making for a very fast, one-sitting read -- apt for readers also on aeroplanes.
The characters were likable and with definite chemistry, though with voices that didn't distinguish themselves from hordes of other romantic leads. I guess that helped them, though, in a way, adding a familiarity to them that made investing in their story easier. Though without any real development from their either lead, the novel couldn't be called affecting.
The plot also follows the typical structure of romance closely: the couple meets and hits it off, something splits them up, and they reunite. In this case, the something that split them up was airport routine completely independent of them, so their reunion didn't involve any character development or personal demons conquered. Still, while there was little depth, Statistical Probability was very fun to just stop thinking and read.
The romance was sweet, unmushy, and a believable whirlwind that I'm a sucker for. The characters were likable, and occasionally funny, and the story progressed quickly. It's the classic feel-good rom-com translated to paper. It's the exact story you predict from the adorable edition cover. It's the quick cure to a miserable day.
Overall, The Statistical Probability was a cute and entertaining read, if a little generic. It should definitely appeal to fans of YA romance.
