Love Your Frenemies by Mina V. Esguerra - Book Review

Author: Mina V. Esguerra
Title: Love Your Frenemies
Place Published: Manila, Philippines
Publisher: Mina V. Esguerra 
Year Published: 2011
No. of Pages: 119 (on my Samsung Galaxy S3)
Price: US$3.99 (Kindle Version)
Place Bought: Amazon 

The book cover of my Kindle version.

Love Your Frenemies is a contemporary romance novella about Kimmy Domingo, a young woman who had everything going for her in life. She grew up comfortably under the loving care of her mother, and the money of her father, who had left the family when Kimmy was but a child.

Father’s money paid for membership to the Country Club, where mother and daughter spent plenty of time with loved ones over the years. Career-wise Kimmy was the very best, and a promotion was definitely coming soon. It was also at work where she found the love of her life.

But disaster struck when he unceremoniously dumped her a week before their wedding.

Word spread through the grapevine, and the rumor-mill at work and at the Country Club ran like clockwork. Unable to come to grips with the sudden breakup, and scrutiny from her office mates and friends, Kimmy quit her job, hopped on a plane, and escaped from her life in Manila. She severed all communication with her loved ones, by not buying a phone and refusing to read and answer e-mails, even from her mother.

A year later, Kimmy flies home for the wedding of her best friend Chesca. She had no idea about the wedding until the foster family she was living with told her about it. I’m ready to start over, she thinks to herself. But is she ready to face everyone else: her mother, her best friend, her first love?

A surprise visit from the tall and handsome Manolo Mella only complicates things for Kimmy, the day she arrives in Manila

  

Review:

I very much prefer the (new) cover of the print version.

Mina V. Esguerra’s Love Your Frenemies is a fun and engaging love story brought to life by Kimmy Domingo’s believability as a character. Kimmy has problems—lots of them, and they have to do as much with herself as with others around her. She is not some princess who has been wronged and can do no wrong, but a human being, a woman with personality, character, and all the good and bad that comes with being a real girl.

The first person perspective used by the author reveals how Kimmy is blind to her own problems, preventing her from mending relationships with her loved ones. In the novella, Mina’s shifting between Kimmy’s past and present life, from chapter to chapter, gives readers additional insight on Kimmy, and the way she thinks, acts. The same strategy works well for the other major characters, including Manolo Mella, Kimmy’s childhood friend and first love.

Aside from romance, the novella also explores the protagonist’s relationship with her mother, as well as her best friends: Chesca and Isabel. The story is very well-rounded and multi-dimensional, happily unlike what I was expecting when I bought a copy of it from Amazon.

I also enjoyed some of the tiny details, such as the chair nearest the television set in Kimmy’s living room that Manolo always sits on, or how he always waits for everyone in the office to leave before taking down notes for his personal use (because he has to concentrate on speaking and listening, rather than taking notes during meetings). Small details like these differentiate characters and make them special, to other characters and to he reader.

The Country Club setting in the novella is something I found easy to imagine because I regularly went to the Wack-Wack Golf and Country Club in Mandaluyong when I was younger. I remember taking my first swimming lessons and golf lessons there when I was young. I love their iced tea and halo-halo, which I can no longer enjoy today because the clubhouse restaurant is now managed by Via Mare (I wonder what happened to those recipes).

Love Your Frenemies was a really pleasurable read for me, and I hope to read similar stories from Mina V. Esguerra in the very near future.

P. S.

I have read on Goodreads that Kimmy is actually a character from My Imaginary Ex, Mina’s first published novella. Apparently, everyone hated her in that novella because she was a pure black-and-white evil antagonist there.

Luckily, I chanced upon and bought a copy of it in National Book Store without knowing it was a prequel to Love Your Frenemies. Now I can read it during the Christmas break. Woohoo!

My Rating:

5 out of 5