Review: Bad Date by Ellery Lloyd

      

Print Length: 58 pages

Publisher: Amazon Original Stories (September 1, 2025)

From Goodreads.com:  Fay Roper is a divorced single mom and a globally famous actress. She’s also unlucky in love. Maybe because the last thing Fay wants in a man is yet another superfan. But somehow, every time she has a boyfriend who isn’t a stalker, he abruptly disappears from her life. With the help of her best friend and right-hand woman, Poppy, Fay decides to change the game and join an exclusive new dating app under a false identity. A subscriber named Oliver takes the bait. But Oliver likes to play games too. And only one of them can win.

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My Rating: 1 star out of 5

What makes this whole thing especially irritating for me is that the concept is there. The idea itself wasn't bad at all. Unfortunately, instead of reading like a completed novel (even a short one), this felt more like an outline the author forgot to go back and actually finish.

The characters were flat and, at times, downright confusing. Fay, in particular, has no business calling herself a mother when she hasn’t told her son “no” a single day in his life (including buying him steroids). And that son? Somehow he’s portrayed as both a muscular fourteen-year-old, built like a grown man (thanks to those steroids) and a child who has to sleep in bed with his mommy every single night. No, I’m not exaggerating.

Sadly, the plot itself was all over the place and so implausible that it genuinely made my head hurt. We’re told Fay is a “washed-up” actress who hasn’t landed a role in years and is so broke her house is about to be repossessed within weeks. Yet she also has a podcast with over seven million listeners. So which is it? Is she doing this podcast for free, or is she just spectacularly bad with money? And honestly, after reading the so-called “banter” between Fay and her co-host, who is also supposedly her childhood best friend, I found it hard to believe she had seven listeners, let alone seven million. The dialogue was painfully stiff and made it obvious they were planting information rather than having anything resembling a natural conversation.

Now let’s talk about the two most glaring plot hole? Fay tells her podcast audience that she’s been having issues at home and believes someone has been inside her house. This is a lie, something she later admits outright to Poppy, even stating that she never actually contacted the police, despite claiming on the podcast that she had. So when she finally does call the police at the end of the book after staging a break-in to sell her version of events, are we really supposed to believe no one would notice she’d never filed any prior reports? Or that law enforcement wouldn’t question that discrepancy at all?

Even more baffling is the fact that Fay and Poppy seem completely confident their plan will work without considering the possibility of forensic evidence. How were they so sure nothing they planted, or staged, could be traced back to them and completely unravel their narrative? The book never even attempts to address this.

And the ending? Pure insult to injury. After all of that, it ends on a cliffhanger with zero closure. None. If I could give zero stars, I honestly would for that alone.

On the plus side, it was short, so I didn’t waste too much time on it, and even better, it was free.