Double Booked by Lily Lindon Book Review

Welcome to my review of Double Booked by Lily Lindon. I don’t remember how I chose this book, but I’m so glad I did as I lived it. It was another quick read, a hilarious, light read that I completed in one sitting.

Click me to go to my Review

Synopsis

Gina is about to marry her boyfriend.

George is about to join a lesbian pop band.

Gina and George are the same person.

No wonder Georgina is DOUBLE BOOKED.

Georgina has a strict routine:

1) teach piano to bored children

2) schedule dates with long-term boyfriend

3) repeat until dead

Perfect.

But then, one wild night, she auditions for a famous lesbian pop band and realises:

1) she longs to play her own music

2) she wants to be just like them

3) their drummer is really hot…

Realising she might be bisexual, Georgina – and her schedule – are in chaos. Torn between the safety of her old life, and the freedom of a new one, she does what any rational person would do. She splits herself in two. After all, two lives are twice the fun… right?

About The Author

Lily Lindon is a writer and editor living in London. She studied English at Cambridge, where she wrote, directed, and performed in theatre and comedy shows with the Footlights, at the Edinburgh Fringe, and across the US. She then worked at Penguin Random House, where she published the Vintage Classics’ Love Letters of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. Currently, she’s an Editor on creative writing courses at The Novelry and hosts Wit Lit, an interview podcast about funny books. She won a Comedy Women in Print Prize for ‘funniest sex scene’, an award she is still hiding from her mother. Double Booked is her debut novel, which she wrote during lockdown in a doomed attempt to stay sane.

My Review

Georgina has been in a relationship with her boyfriend Doug for seven years. However, her best friend Sophie is a lesbian, and Georgina starts going to gay bars with her more often as Doug performs with his band elsewhere. Watching the newly formed band at the gay bar, Georgina realises that she wants to get back into performing herself and thinks she might be bisexual because she has feelings for Kat. Suddenly, a spot becomes available in the Lesbian band, and Georgina becomes ‘George’ to fit in and begins to lead a double life, complete with different hairstyles and wardrobes. Sensible, heterosexual, Gina takes the other life, but it all becomes difficult to juggle.

 Despite being marketed as a romantic comedy, this focuses more heavily on the comedy and working out your sexuality plotline. Trying to compartmentalise Georgina’s life in two seems to be the best way forward for Georgina while she struggles to work out if she is bisexual and find her true self. Romance is a big part of this but not the main plotline. However, there is a lot of romance in both of her lives, with Doug and possible new female relationships. There are plenty of fallouts, drama and misunderstandings, but everything comes together by the end of double-booked as she finds her feet and realises that not everything needs to be so rigid.

I enjoyed that this ‘finding yourself’ plotline was centred around someone older than your typical teen and younger than the middle-aged crisis point. Coming to terms with being bisexual when you are in a long term relationship and have been established as straight for your whole life is much different than discovering it as a teenager, and this book deal with that really well. Georgina initially throws herself into many of the stereotypes, which was, at first, really annoying, but this was short-lived and actually became more humorous. The comedy around trying to make sure he listened to the right music, worse, the proper ‘lesbian’ clothing etc., wasn’t over-explained but clearly stereotypes, including loving cats. I wish she had met some LGBTQ people who liked dogs though, as she is portrayed as enjoying both, and it would have been nice to break that final stereotype!

Double booked also explored open relationships a little, though it ultimately showed that it doesn’t work out for everyone. Again, this was a wonderfully light read that I managed in one sitting. I was utterly engrossed in the plot and the characters.

I enjoyed all of the characters, which has recently seemed a little unusual to me. They are primarily in their twenties and have things figured out aside from Georgina, but Sophie and her friends, the other band members and others around her are supportive and help her navigate her new world. I think this would be the ideal book for a sequel showing how life has changed for Georgina in her new life or even focusing on another character as lots of them were exciting, and I would love to read more about them.

If you are looking for something light, funny and engrossing that’s easy to read, this book is for you!

Rated