  Dating is hard, but being dateless at your perfect sister's wedding is even harder. Tara Singh Carlson Kelly is a twenty year old robotics engineer from San Jose, Silicon Valley. Brilliant, ambitious, perfectionist, super analytical...as well as socially awkward and hopelessly single, Kelly is a typical middle child, craving her parents' approval by being 'safe and responsible'. Now Kelly's charming younger sister is getting married and their mother (whose flair for silliness and dramatics reminded me of Mrs Bennet from Pride and Prejudice) is keen to find Kelly a date to maintain the necessary symmetry in the upcoming wedding photos. Kelly is not exactly against the idea, it's just that her flight instinct overrides her logical circuits and she literally runs away in the opposite direction from her date. She even joins a dating website and comes up with a lengthy and awfully precise list of essential attributes (including wearing V-necks and love of twinkies). only to get -Surprise, surprise!-no match. In a moment of genius, Kelly decides to build a robot boyfriend and endow him with a charming smile, easy-going personality and crystalline blue eyes. Meet Ethan, her newest engineering success, gorgeous, thoughful, smart, attentive to her needs, quickly learning from his mistakes, and totally non-judgemental boyfriend. Ethan is safe to talk to, to go out or watch a comedy and lounge on the sofa in old sweats with. Ethan is universally liked wherever he goes, although he is indeed too perfect to be real. By its nature, the robot boyfriend trope is predictable. We all know it is bound to end with the human heroine meeting a slightly imperfect human who is totally going to eclipse the devoted mechanical heart out of his (its?) brief existence. True, but within this predictability there is so much scope for building up characters and showing their evolution, and this is precisely what Sarah Archer does. At the heart of the novel is Kelly's journey to understand and change herself. Her lacklustre love life which culminated in the much fretted absence of a wedding date didn't come out of blue. It was deeply rooted in her fear of getting too close to somebody, fear of ending up in a relationship where nobody talks about things that matter, fear of indifference and giving in. Ethan is her ultimate version of a safety net, a man programmed to love her unconditionally the way she is. Eventually, she does realise love isn't love where there is no free will. And you have to give it to her, Kelly is willing to learn from the data life is stubbornly providing her with. A charming debut novel and a perfect summer beach read, The Plus one is chick lit in its pure unadulterated form. Don't expect groundbreaking reflections or serious philosophy from it. It is meant to be lighthearted, entertaining and optimistic in its deeply held belief that 'You live and you learn' and if your learning comes from mistakes...well, you're only human. Comments are closed.
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