Unfortunately, this was a DNF for me. I gave it the old college try and made it over 50% of the way through it but I found myself not really enjoying the story or the characters. The plot sounded promising, a grumpy diner owner is Alaska and the tourist that fall for each other. The characters seemed one-dimensional to me and the side characters also didn't add very much to the story. There wasn't much backstory for any of the characters and that lack of storytelling left me disconnected from the characters. I didn't really get them or their motivations and in turn I felt that the romance really fizzled. No chemistry. Other readers might enjoy this book but it wasn't for me.

‘The Tourist Attraction’ is quirky romcom by Sarah Morganthaler and certainly fits the ‘cute’ label, with a ton of secondary characters adding squiggly (and sometimes unbelievably complicated) lines and flavour to the plot. But that was also where it also unfortunately stalled for me.

After the witty, entertaining start, ‘The Tourist Attraction’ seemed to consist of more fumbling, awkward moments—all calculated to be rom-com funny—but in doing so, compromised on depth and perhaps, emotional entanglement that didn’t go beneath the snappy and cute one-liners. There were interesting bits but bigger and bigger pockets of lull and scenes that didn’t seem to build to anywhere, and if it was wild to begin with, I started increasingly skimming towards the middle and end when Morganthaler simply added on Zoey Caldwell’s bucket list and her increasing ‘bumps’ into Graham Barnett.

Graham wasn’t all I expected, but then, maybe I’d become accustomed to reading about the typical (and fictional) mountain man living in the remote bits of the country. Instead, the odd levity that his character had and his inexplicable attraction to Zoey made him very much a surface protagonist in some ways; I was waiting for the other side of the coin to drop or a tragic revelation in some aspect of his life but it never did. Ditto with Zoey who by and large, created little conflict with her entrance, only that she and Graham didn’t entirely make the world’s most interesting or eye-catching couple that I was solidly for or against.

Essentially, I came off the book slowing asking myself what the point was—admittedly there’s little romantic and familial drama that would appeal to some readers—and couldn’t quite figure it out even after Graham and Zoey finally made out into their sunset…obviously a case of just me.