Ivy West is a travel nurse who loves to play matchmaker.
Beau Wall is a minor league baseball player with his sights on the majors lands the hospital. (Fun fact: Scotty, Noah's agent from First Love, Second Draft makes a brief appearance in A Very Merry Match Up.)
There's an undeniable spark between him and Ivy. She does what any girl in her position would do...she tries to set him up with her best friend Lucy. The chemistry between Beau and Ivy was one of my favorite parts of the book.
In A Very Merry Match Up the matchmaker gets a taste of her own medicine. Ivy has some deep scars from her childhood. Her parents divorce ingrained in her certain ideals and tendencies she clung to of what she did and didn't want in a marriage. Over the course of the story, her ideals shift.
I was howling with laughter at so many scenes in this book. Becca's humor tickles my funny bone. I loved the clever use of pop culture references from Hollywood's Golden Age. So skillfully woven in. For me, old movies are a close 2nd to my love of reading and whenever the two (reading and old movies) are combined you've got a fan for life. Becca Kinzer is an auto-buy author for me. One aspect, I appreciate about Becca's stories is how you end up falling in love with all the characters she creates in her books. She's consistently done that in every book and it's part of what keeps me coming back to her stories.
I enjoyed the dual POV of Ivy and Beau in A Very Merry Match Up. I liked that the audiobook version had dual narrators as well. It added more enjoyment and depth to the story.
If you love laugh-a-minute, sidesplitting humor set during the holidays you need to add A Very Merry Match Up to your TBR pile. I'd rate this a solid 4 1/2 out of 5 stars. My reason being Ivy's insistence on following her plan drove me a little nuts, but I think the author was trying to show her readers we can all be like Ivy during certain times in our life. All in all, a great holiday read not to be missed.
