To Sir With Love by Lauren Layne

If you loved the movie "Email for you" with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks back in the 90s, this is for you!

Gracie Cooper is the owner of the champagne and gift shop Bubbles & More in Manhattan. She is continuing her parents legacy, however the business is not doing well. It seems impossible to save the shop, but Gracie is not going down without trying! With lots of courage and creativity she tries to rescue Bubbles & More - even if she is once again sacrificing her talent and love for painting for the family legacy.

The handsome Sebastian Andrews, part of the family-run real estate corporation Bubbles & More is located in belongs to comes into the picture. He tries to buy out Gracies lease for a new project and doesn't make her life easier by constantly showing up and monitoring her rescue attempts.

The only thing that sparks Gracie´s joy is her online-romance to Sir. Someone she met anonymously on a dating forum and with whom she loves sharing conversations. But will she eventually meet him and how is he when real life hits? At the same time her feelings for Sebastian also grow stronger, despite her determined dislike for him.

Her support gang of siblings, friends and employees of Bubbles & More deem it impossible to fall in love virtually and in the book it shows whether Gracie is able to prove them wrong!

"That dreamy smile comes to your face every time you check your phone"

Entertaining, witty and refreshing read, with a very lovely happy end for Gracie, definitely something for the romance novel fans amongst us. If you loved the movie "Email for you" with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks back in the 90s, you will love this book. Woman meets man anonymously online, they fall in love. So far so good, but the crux: in real life they actually know each other and are rivals! Even if the storyline of the book was quite foreseeable it was and fun and enjoyable read.

What I found very interesting and what I learnt from reading the author's note was that the actual theme of "unconsciously meeting the person you actually have a romantic letter/mail/text relationship" is not an unknown one. It was first used in the Hungarian play "Parfumerie" (1937) by Miklós László, where two rivalling and often-arguing employees of a boutique in Budapest are actually also romantic pen-pals. The play of László was then adopted by Hollywood to the 1940 film "The Shop Around the Corner", with two bookshop employees and again in the musical film "In the Good Old Summertime" 1949 with Judy Garland and and Van Johnson playing two employees of a music shop in Chicago. Nora Ephron then turned the letters into emails in her screenplay. It is a wonderful and timeless plot and reminds how coincidental life can be. Maybe there will be more adaptions of László's play in the future?