FICTION
Love Unwritten
Lauren Asher
Piatkus, $22.99

On Goodreads, a review of Lauren Asher’s latest novel, Love Unwritten, is a simple row of assorted emojis: love heart, flower, plane, palm tree on island, bikini and house.

In some way, that’s all you need to take the temperature of the popular romance author’s second instalment in her Lakehouse Billionaires series. The book is fun, compulsive and sweet. It flips from being proudly superficial to earnest and pensive, but it is never dull or spiky — the main characters are too charming.

The story follows two wounded souls, Ellie Sinclair, a budding musician recovering from being recently betrayed by her former best friend (now a world renowned folk-pop star whose songs Ellie co-wrote but was never credited for), and Rafael Lopez, a tech billionaire single dad bruised after a nasty divorce.

As his live-in nanny, Ellie finds herself ensconced in Rafael’s world of the 0.0001 per cent. This book wears all the colours of the billionaire romance genre with flair and ease. Private jets and weekends in Europe appear luxurious and attractive, but not when your boss is a grumpy 31-year-old who uses his masculine privilege to get away with treating people with grave disrespect – even if he has the sculpted abs of a Greek god and the deep gravelly voice of Antonio Banderas.

It’s tricky working for a man who admits he has always done a good job of repressing his uncomfortable emotions, learning to shield his feelings with “toxic coping skills and a willingness to do anything for anyone”. This last is a stretch, for his devotion is singular.

At the centre of their relationship is Nico, Rafael’s eight-year-old son who has a degenerative eye disease and tries to mask his deteriorating sight from his father. After all, his father is busy being the capital patriarch figurehead … in this case, as the founder of America’s most popular real estate app: his co-founder is his cousin who was the gallant protagonist of Asher’s first Lakehouse Billionaire novel, Love Redesigned.

Rafael feels bad that he is unable to provide the tender home life he wants for his son and the two are unable to connect on an emotional level, preferring to suffer privately. Enter the nourishing, over-generous and forgiving woman, Ellie. Each of these male characters offloads their emotional burden onto the only consistent woman in their lives, and she takes it all open heartedly. (What else can we expect from our gloriously flawed yet loveable heroines?)