This book is a snack. I mean that in the best and most honest way possible — it's not a five-course meal, it's not trying to be, and sometimes you just need a bag of spicy chips at midnight while your cats stare at you like you've lost it.
I pressed play on Dating in the Dark while batch-resizing social media assets for a client — the kind of mindless design work where my hands are busy but my brain is floating. And honestly? This was the perfect companion for exactly that energy. Under four hours, enemies-to-lovers, speed dating premise with a gimmick (the dates happen literally in the dark), and a heroine named Tinley who's turning thirty and whose friends have staged what amounts to a dating intervention. I felt that in my bones. My friends tried to sign me up for a pottery class last month "to meet people." Ma'am, I meet people. I just don't like most of them.
The Panties-Ablaze Premise
Okay so the setup: Tinley goes speed dating in a pitch-black room, hates it, is about to bail, and then date number four shows up with a voice that apparently rewires her entire nervous system. Fifteen minutes. That's all it takes. And then they start texting — the kind of flirty, banter-heavy texting that Alexandria Bishop actually writes pretty well. The back-and-forth has that effortless rhythm where you can tell someone's smiling while they type. I was smiling while I listened. The reveal of who this mystery man actually is? You can see it coming from about hour one, but that's fine. That's the genre. We're not here for the surprise, we're here for the reaction to the surprise.
The enemies-to-lovers angle kicks in once Tinley realizes her mystery dream date is someone she already knows — and can't stand — from work. Bishop leans into the awkwardness of that collision pretty well, though I'll say the "enemies" part felt more like mild professional irritation than genuine animosity. They bicker, but it's always flirty bickering, never the kind that makes you wonder if these two people actually dislike each other. So if you want true hate-to-love tension, this is more like... mild-annoyance-to-love. Which is still fun! Just calibrated expectations. Someone to Trust scratches a very similar itch — low-stakes, warm, the kind of romance where the tension is more about timing than actual conflict.
CJ Bloom and the Art of the Light Touch
CJ Bloom narrates this with an easy, warm delivery that fits the book's tone like a glove. She handles the humor well — there are a few moments where Tinley's internal monologue gets genuinely funny, and Bloom lands those beats without overselling them. Her male voice work is serviceable — not the kind where you forget it's a woman reading, but not distracting either. For a book this short and breezy, she's a good match. I wouldn't say her performance made me feel things the way Julia Whelan or Andi Arndt can, but she kept me engaged through a pretty standard rom-com plot without ever pulling me out of the story. That counts for something.
Who's Picking This Up (and Who Should Keep Scrolling)
Here's the thing — at three hours and fifty-nine minutes, this is barely longer than a movie. And it feels like a movie. A cute, predictable, Hallmark-adjacent movie where you know exactly how it ends and you watch it anyway because the leads have chemistry and it's raining outside. I didn't cry. Not once. (That's rare for me — I literally cried during a cereal commercial last week.) This book isn't going for emotional depth. It's going for charm, and it mostly gets there.
If you want a palate cleanser between heavier reads, or something to listen to while you're doing dishes or organizing your Dropbox or — I don't know — resizing 47 Instagram story templates at 2 PM on a Wednesday, this works. If you want something that's going to wreck you, that's going to make you text your best friend at midnight saying "I am NOT okay," keep looking. This one stays light. Deliberately, comfortably light.
Abuela would've said it was "cute but where's the drama, mija?" And she'd be right. But sometimes cute is enough.
The Rosary Stays in the Drawer for This One
Sweet, fast, low-stakes, and exactly what it promises to be. I'm not rushing to grab book two, but I'm not mad I spent an afternoon with Tinley and her mystery man either. It's a rainy Sunday book — no, actually, it's a sunny Tuesday book. The kind of day where nothing's wrong and nothing's extraordinary and you just want to smile at your screen for a few hours. That's Dating in the Dark. A smile, not a sob. And that's okay.
