I love Eloisa James! And this book has some of her signature skills-- the literary references, the breezy humor, and sense of fun.... But the plot was just too ridiculous for me and the heroine too humiliated and lacking in self esteem. I also don't get these books that tell you a heroine isn't pretty and then voila! she is at the end: every one who once said she was plain starts saying, oh, she was wearing the wrong clothes, she just needed confidence.... That seems like quite a stretch. It's one thing to say people react differently when they get to know her but here there were just lots of awkward inconsistencies. 
 Also I wasn't sure what to make of the meta elements. The heroine is a romance writer (a la Maya Rodale's Billionaire series) and each chapter was prefaced with a bit of her work-in-process. Great! The (bad) writing was funny but what were we readers supposed to make of all those in jokes about romance? Was James mocking her heroine, the genre, herself-- or not? There are strange stagey references to other romance writers named Julia Qui... and a Lisa Kle..., which seem like more in jokes. But to what end? Sometimes it seemed like the whole book was written for the author's own amusement.