REVIEW: THE FLATSHARE, BY BETH O’LEARY

Tiffy and Leon share an apartment. Tiffy and Leon have never met.

After a bad breakup, Tiffy Moore needs a place to live. Fast. And cheap. But the apartments in her budget have her wondering if astonishingly colored mold on the walls counts as art.

Desperation makes her open minded, so she answers an ad for a flatshare. Leon, a night shift worker, will take the apartment during the day, and Tiffy can have it nights and weekends. He’ll only ever be there when she’s at the office. In fact, they’ll never even have to meet.

Tiffy and Leon start writing each other notes – first about what day is garbage day, and politely establishing what leftovers are up for grabs, and the evergreen question of whether the toilet seat should stay up or down. Even though they are opposites, they soon become friends. And then maybe more.

But falling in love with your roommate is probably a terrible idea…especially if you’ve never met.

 

The Flatshare was an adorable and delightful journey that takes two strangers that start off sharing a flat in their “off hours” to the ordinary notes that turn cute. Like a “meet cute” without actually seeing each other.

They each discover that the connection that is slowly building through the shared post-it notes begins to feel like a relationship. Especially when their friends begin pushing for them to take the next step: to actually meet.

How the meeting happens turns into a kind of on-off effort that is another part of the slow-build journey. There is much to sort out, beginning with how to get past the baggage of their past relationships.

One might conclude that this is just a predictable romantic story, but the quirky and unusual elements turned it into so much more. I liked the way we could see the characters through their notes and their internal monologues…and then watch their missteps along the way until finally, we had a satisfactory ending. 5 stars.

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