The No-Show by Beth O’Leary

I read The Flatshare by Beth O’Leary in 2020 (one of my earliest 99p Kindle purchases!), and thought it was fine. Cute but I found the main character was annoyingly “quirky” in every aspect. It also tried to tackle some heavy topics (if I recall coercive control and abusive relationships) in a way that I found too shallow. I gave it three stars at the time, though this was during a time when I didn’t bother writing reviews.

I borrowed The No-Show audiobook on a whim purely because it was available through BorrowBox and saved me wading through the app to find something else! I love all the free access to audiobooks but that app is terrible to navigate.

The cover, the very “rom-commy” title and the description for this book are misleading. It does become clear very early in the story – given hard the author works for us to like him – that this is not about a man simultaneously seeing three women but rather at different points in time.

While it has plenty of tired romantic comedy tropes – the assortment of women with “quirky” not entirely believable jobs and each with few “quirky” side character friends – it is neither funny or a great romance. It plays out as more of a drama, and tries to get heavy with emotional/traumatic back stories that didn’t really work for me because as a whole I found it lacked depth (as in The Flatshare).

The biggest problem is that three is is too many protagonists for this kind of book. You cycle through them too often to feel invested in their relationship with Joseph, or really understand what they even like about each other other than he’s just attractive and nice. It’s too much telling and not enough showing. A big problem I had is also that the relationship that is meant to have the biggest emotional punch was also the weakest. I just didn’t believe it, and so I didn’t care.

Of the three women I liked Jane the most, and I think she got the strongest characterisation and I found her quieter personality easiest to identify with. Miranda was fine, I guess, female tree surgeon at least felt like a fresh take on the “quirky job” trope, but I never understood her relationship with Joseph when neither seemed that into each other. Siobhan was a rather bland influencer/life coach type – nothing but attractive, confident and successful in a vague handwaving way. I had zero interest in her.

But I will say, nobody in this book was annoying as I found Tiffy in The Flat-Share! At worst I just felt indifferent to the characters.

Another issue – unrelated the content of the novel but my experience of reading it – is that the audiobook I listened to was not well produced (it was as Bolinda audio one, read by Evanna Lynch, Kathryn Drysdale, Heather Long and Luke Thompson). Two of the three narrator’s had horrific mouth noise and clicks on their audio, the one for Jane’s (Kathryn Drysdale) chapters was particularly bad. I am shocked they put out something this bad to be honest!

I cannot stand any kind of mouth sounds – any eating, drinking, smacking lips etc (I definitely have misophonia) – so it almost made it unlistenable but if I sped it up to 1.5x speed and didn’t have it too loud I could just stand it. A real shame because not only was this my favourite character but her performance was really great (she’s a great actress!). So, actually while I found Siobhan the most boring her audio was actually the cleanest!

This book was an all around challenge to get though!

In the end it was just a bit boring, and I was irritated by the misleading marketing. There is also a point (about 80% in) where the plot starts to come together and I could suddenly see where everything was going but it still felt like it took an eternity to get to the end.

A solid 2 stars – I got to the end, but it gave me some bad feelings and I’ll probably forget all about it within a month!