Score: 4/5 Bookmarks

Steam Rating: 🍆/5

Thank you to Audiobookworm Promotions for gifting me a copy of The Yes Factor by Erin Spencer and Emma Sable, and including me on this fun audiobook tour!

Liv and Bex have been best friends since school, but their lives have diverged over the years. Liv lives with her lawyer husband in London and Bex is a divorced mother to a 13-year-old daughter, living in Los Angeles. Bex thinks Liv has the ideal life and marriage, while Liv thinks Bex has so much fun dating potential in front of her. But they both have secrets, insecurities, and challenges they need to deal with.

Bex has been dabbling in using dating apps, but not very successfully and Liv decides she needs a break from her life so flies over to LA to spend the week with her. While she’s in town she is determined to get Bex back out into the dating world, in part to take focus off of her own troubles.

I definitely related to a lot of Liv and Bex’s relationship, with my own bestie (since childhood) living in Australia while I’m in the USA, and I loved watching them reunite and get to know each other again after so much time apart.

The premise of saying ‘yes’ also made for some very entertaining shenanigans, and while I’m not going to give any of those away here (you’ll just have to read it for yourself) I definitely found myself laughing out loud on more than one occasion. It’s not all fun and frivolity though. Things have been strained between Liv and her husband for a while, and couples counseling doesn’t seem to be helping, so Liv takes off to California and doesn’t tell Ethan she’s going. He thinks she’s on a girls’ weekend in France, and doesn’t seem too concerned about her being gone either way. You’re basically going to want to give both women a big hug by the end of this book.

I loved that both Bex and Liv are 40 rather than 20. That was refreshing and felt a lot more real, and certainly relatable to me. Sometimes those mistakes and choices made by 20-somethings in rom-coms are so repetitive, frustrating and plain boring if you’ve actually been there and done that already. So this was a pleasant change of scenery if you will. And speaking of scenery, after being stuck under weeks of Seattle rain I’m living vicariously through this book and soaking up some California sun!

You’ll fly through the audiobook too. It’s fast-paced and wonderfully narrated by Ava Erickson and Andi Arndt, both of whom have narrated more amazing romances than I can count, so chances are you’ll recognize their voices. The audio comes in at just under 7 hours, and I binged it in a day. You can download your own copy (which I highly recommend) via the button below, or get a physical copy here.

Trigger warnings for cheating, and divorce.

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Synopsis:

Liv just wants her best friend Bex to find love. 

Bex just wants to stay in bed with Outlander.

With 40 right around the corner, divorced single mom Bex is too busy being a chauffeur for her teenage daughter to bother swiping for dates. Her best friend Liv, who is married to the supposedly perfect man, swoops in from London on a mission to get Bex out of her own bed and in to someone else's. Liv pushes Bex into a week-long whirlwind of dates, awkward kisses and missed connections.

What could possibly go wrong when Bex agrees to Liv's harebrained scheme of saying Yes to every possible suitor? And why is Liv so intent on fixing Bex's love life, or lack thereof? 

Just what do you find out when all of your no's turn into The Yes Factor?