50 Acts of Kindness

What’s it about?

Being overly kind isn’t in Kylie Harrow’s nature. This has never been more evident than when Kylie vents her frustrations to an innocent employee—and the whole scene is posted online, tanking her career and earning her the dubious distinction of “World’s Worst Boss.” But when she flees home to the South, Kylie finds her childhood home has changed. The high school quarterback is now the hot and handsome sheriff. Her mother has turned her home into a nudist colony. And worst of all, having heard about her daughter’s exploits, her mother won’t let her in the door until Kylie completes fifty kind acts in fifty days.

The task seems easy enough at first—and may even help repair her media image—but it quickly turns into a hilarious quest that leads Kylie down a bumpy road filled with new challenges. What started as a gimmick to save her career evolves into a mission to save a spunky old woman and her little dog from homelessness. As Kylie learns about the nature of kindness, she finds the path to happiness and, for the first time ever, maybe even love.

You can buy a copy of this book on Amazon UK / Amazon US.

Review

Yes ! This is what I was craving for. This is exactly what I want to read when I look for a book in this genre. The writing is so funny; I’m never going to think about YouTube how I used to.

“”It’s YouTube”, I said. “Which, now that I think of it sounds like the name of a tampon. YouTube, the people’s tampon.””

Without Kylie’s knowledge a conversation between her and her pregnant assistant was recorded and tossed online with the caption ‘World’s Worst Boss’. In her way up to the top she kind of lost all feeling with the people she works with and now it has come back to bite her. After this debacle, she decides to visit her mother back home in Cedar Falls. Her mother is happy to have her stay on one condition: Kylie needs to perform 50 acts of kindness, just like her mother promoted in the book she wrote. It’s not as if Kylie has much choice, but when she thinks about it she can see the potential of doing some damage control to her image this way.

Many funny situations follow, with all the necessary elements to make this an enjoyable romantic comedy. She tries to help people who don’t need or want help and gets herself in a pickle, time and time again. Luckily for her there’s Chet, the hot sheriff who always comes to Kylie’s rescue at the right time and smooths things down. And then there’s also the shock she gets when she finds out that her mother is now running a B&B for nudists too. There’s only so much averting of her eyes she can do ;-).

“Why would a nudist wear a nightgown? ” It’s just one of the pertinent questions in this novel.

I really loved all the characters in this novel: Marcus, the gay sidekick slash hairdresser, Chet who she would love to hate, her mother who’s loving and kind and never judges her, and of course Bat. Bat is the dog that finds her. He’s an ugly little mutt with an underbite and sail-like ears and he turns around so many times around himself she proclaims he’s a dog with Tourette’s syndrome. At first she doesn’t want anything to do with him but he grows on her. It’s because she wants Bat to have a good home that she decides to fix up the house of his owner Margaret. She however is a bitter old lady and anything but cooperating. Her grand act of kindness is hard to achieve to say the least when Margaret drives anyone away offering help. Disappointment has shaped her character. Will Kylie desert her too, and will she leave Chet behind to go back to her beloved New York?

This book will have you laughing a lot in the beginning but gradually it becomes more serious and inspirational, with a surprising amount of substance and lessons for what was such a hilarious off-set. The narration of Kylie’s growth was really well done and the idea so invigorating that it makes me want to smile, be nice and start doing my own Acts of Kindness. I loved all the little quotes at the beginning of each chapter too, as well as the detail of all the different aprons her mother wears with a new saying to start the day.

 “Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret” – Ambrose Bierse

 I received a free copy of this novel in a giveaway (you can read my post about it here) and this is my honest opinion.