What is there not to like from a book about finding yourself. Am I Allergic to Men tells the story if Lucy who forget the past 10 years of her life after a bike accident. Lucy is brash, promiscuous, loud and unapologetically herself. After her accident all of her sisters and family come together to try and help her remember what she has lost. Its a heartfelt story of support, love, friendships, family and finding yourself.

Lucy the youngest of 5 sisters lives her life on her terms, until she is hit by a bus and 10 yrs of her life is missing! Her sisters all rally around Lucy waiting to see if she will pull through. Once she wakes up she is shocked to see her sisters looking so old. In her mind she is 17, but in reality she is pushing 30. With the years missing the sisters go to extremes in an effort to get her to recall her missing years. Friends show up hoping to jog a memory. Will Lucy recall her life? Will she come to terms with the path she has taken which is dramatically different from what her 17 yr old self expected.

This was a fast read. Funny at times. Underlining the questions of what we dream as teenager rarely become our future reality.
Thank you to netgalley for complimentary copy.

I went in to this book mostly blind. I had skimmed the back and chose it mainly based on the cover. It was not what I was expected based on the cover. I would definitely not categorize it as romantic comedy, although there is comedy present. This book is mainly about the relationship Lucy (the main character) has with her family and herself as she progresses through the story.

At the beginning, Lucy is in an accident before her thirtieth birthday and wakes up from a coma thinking she is seventeen. She embarks on a journey with her sisters to recover her memories to forgotten places and to meet forgotten people. She learns that she was bold and "lived her best life" and tries to remember how she got to be that person. As she looks at her parents, the relationships that her sisters have had in their lives, as well as those she has been a part of, she asks herself, "Am I Allergic to Men?"

All in all, I think the ending wrapped up the book well, but I would have been fine without reading the Epilogue. While the part about Lucy shouldn't have surprised me given what I read in the book, it just didn't seem to fit.

Thanks Net Galley for my advanced copy!

What a brilliant way to end 2021 with this thought-provoking and amusing book. Thank you Netgalley and Bookouture for this Advanced Readers Copy.

What would you do if you couldnt remember 12 years of your life? We follow Lucy as she rediscovers her life, through love, friendship and family. It's sometimes emotional, sometimes funny. I really enjoyed this book and cant wait to read more by Kristen Bailey

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishing team for this ARC!

Unforanuely, I didn't enjoy this. Once again, I wish Netgalley indicated that this book was part of a series since I didn't know. However, this book had enough backstory that you didn't feel like you missed out on <i>too</i> much.

Lucy was not a favorite character of mine. Frankly, she was annoying as hell and I cringed a lot at her antics. She was the type of obnoxious you want to punch in the face. The opening scene at the birthday party was the nicest one but after that, it was hard to sympathize simply because the humor wasn't funny, it was crass and too much. It got old pretty fast.

The only highlight in this book was her relationship with her sisters. I always appreciate good sisterly relationships. I was mostly disappointed that the title had nothing to do with the book? It was the reason I requested it but alas.

This was the first time I read any of the books in this series by Kristen Bailey and it won't be the last. I absolutely loved this book. This was such a fun and at times, heartfelt read that I looked forward to picking up on an evening whilst snuggled up on the sofa. The author keeps it very real which I think made it so much more funnier.
Full of love, life and laughter, this book comes highly recommended from me!!


Special thanks to NetGalley and Bookouture for sharing this digital reviewer copy with me in exchange my honest opinions.

An amusing read and the end of the books about five sisters. Lucy is a free spirit and blunt to the point for being brutal. I cringed for the character in many of the scenes. There is being blunt and then there is plain obnoxiousness. I liked the opening scene at the kid’s party the best. I was amused by her visiting her exes, something I have no interest in emulating.

Lucy Callaghan - almost actress, part time party princess impersonator, Dorito connoisseur, owner of the worlds grumpiest cat and now … amnesiac.

While rushing to a last minute gig dressed as Elsa, her bike and a bus collide, and the bus wins. Waking up in hospital, it's like the last ten years have vanished and she's seventeen again. She doesn't remember becoming an auntie, or Netflix and smartphones, living through a pandemic, discovering her sexuality and her passions … or even why she has tweety-pie tattooed on her ankle.

But as she tries to piece together the past decade of her life, the friends, the jobs, the lovers - she can't help but look at her sisters lives and compare them. They're stable, secure, sure about their path - so can Lucy find the thing she's been missing when she can't even remember who she is?

"I've kept looking to this other Lucy as another person, comparing myself to her constantly, thinking I need to live up to her, become her. Maybe she's always been there."

Every time we revisit the Callaghan sisters it's like hearing from old friends - and this final instalment to the Pentalogy might be Kristen Baileys best yet. From the first line, I fell in love with Lucy - she was powerful, sassy, unapologetic and an absolute delight despite making the same stupid and questionable decisions we all have at some point.

Much like Elsa, Lucy doesn't need a random royal to save her. While the title and blurb might make it seem like this is another story about a girl who finds love and it solves everything, that doesn't reflect the story well enough at all - it's about a raw, real woman who find their place in their world on their own merit and don't fall in line with what's expected. Bailey creates such complex and beautiful characters - from mothers to lovers, doctors to dancers and each of them are strong, unique and fiercely feminist in their own right.

Now, for a minute I was worried this story was heading towards some serious bisexual erasure - but instead this ends up being affirming about just how fluid and personal sexuality is for each person

Full of laughs and tears, Bailey asks the important questions like When is it acceptable to drop kick a child? and Why haven't Disney written any songs about smoked salmon yet? all while weaving a beautifully uplifting story about an unforgettable journey and tied up as perfectly as real life can be.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

I was gifted an advanced reviewers copy of this title in return for an honest review.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing this book in exchange for an honest review.
This is the fifth and final book in the Callaghan Sisters series. I've read them all and enjoyed each one and was definitely looking forward to reading Lucy's book. (You don't have to read them in order but I recommend all of them.)
I was expecting this book to be more wild and crazy than it was considering Lucy's reputation, and it did have plenty of Lol moments but it also had a much more serious and deeper quality to it too. I appreciated the focus on friendships and the closeness of family, especially in difficult times.

I was in the middle of reading two books and the latest Kristen Bailey book popped up on my NetGalley this morning, so of course I immediately started (and finished) reading the 5th book in her Callaghan sisters series. “Am I Allergic to Men?” is the youngest sister, Lucy’s book. It was every bit as endearing, funny, and raw as the other novels in this series. Lucy is the youngest of the sisters and is a free spirit. She believes in living life without limits. This is a wonderful and satisfying conclusion to the series. I am so grateful to NetGalley, Bookouture, and Kristen Bailey for the opportunity to read two of her books. I found “How Much Wine Will Fix My Broken Heart?” on NetGalley and went on to read the rest of the books in this series. I adore this series and highly recommend it if you like friendship/sister books with a lot of laughs and maybe a few tears.

I saw the title of this and I'm sad to say it resonated perhaps a little too much.
I love Lucy- shes frank, fearless and very very funny.
Also like how many sisters she has and how close they all are. Like a woke Little Women.
So much is packed into this, and I loved it all. Will definitely be checking out the other reads in this series.

Am I Allergic to Men? is the grand finale in Kristen Bailey’s series of books about the Callaghan sisters. Whilst you don’t have to read them in order, I highly recommend that you read them all before reading this one as it will make you anticipate Lucy’s story even more. I couldn’t wait to get into this one and didn’t even read the synopsis.

We’ve seen quite a lot of Lucy in the other 4 books and she is quite unlike any of the other sisters. She is the youngest and is loud, brash, and unashamedly loves sex.

Quite early on in the story, Lucy is involved in an accident and loses her memories of the last 12 years – all her adult life as the last thing she can remember is being 17! Her sisters, friends, and past lovers take her on a journey to the past to see if it will jog a connection.

I absolutely loved this book, even as a fifty-plus woman who has generally grown tired of books about younger characters. I think everyone will find a little bit of Lucy in their former teenage friends or even a younger version of themselves.

I was expecting this one to be super funny and it lived up to my own hype. There are some emotional moments in it too, and the serious side of memory loss was fascinating too. I couldn’t put it down. Highly recommended.

I’m kinda sad that is the last we’ll see of the Callaghan sisters though, although interested to see what Kristen Bailey will write next.

#BeMoreLucy

What if you lost over ten years of your life… and found out you’re single AF, your cat hates you, and your biggest commitment is to Netflix? Exciting, engrossing, page turner. Keeps you involved even if you know it's fiction. This book was definitely a winner for me, thoroughly enjoyed it and would recommend to all. Thank you to Netgalley, the author and publisher for providing me the opportunity to read this book.

Thank you #Netgalley for this advanced copy from one of my favorite authors.

Another great funny read by Kristen Bailey following the the five sisters. This time we follow Lucy beginning with her perspective. She is an out of work actress who dresses up as Disney princesses for children's parties. Lucy got a last minute booking and hopped on a bike to avoid traffic when she collided with a bus. She woke up in a hospital bed with the last ten years of her life a mystery, amnesia. Her four sisters and parents unite by her side and all move into the parents house to help support her and hopefully bring her memories back. We watch as Lucy revisits places and people to hopefully trigger memories and how she go to where she is today. We learn she was a wild spirit with many partners, friends and unique jobs. This was a fun and quick read! The epilogue jumps ahead a few years and gives updates on each of the sisters. I hope this is the not the last book for these sisters, I want more and what leads up to their life in those next ten years!

I absolutely loved this! Having read the other four in the series it was familiar to me and I just knew I was going to enjoy it. Some proper laugh out loud moments that I just had to keep reading. I loved the relationship between Lucy and her mum, and how, actually, it was quite different to how it has been portrayed previously.
Lucy's story followed that of her sisters perfectly. It differed slightly from the others in that its set after the previous four, but recaps really well without spoiling any of the others.
Lucy is knocked off her bike as she is racing across Waterloo Bridge to play Elsa. She wakes from her coma with no recollection of the last 10 years. We follow her on her journey to get her memory back and along the way revisit (some of the funniest and most memorable) moments from her sisters.
I think it ties up the series brilliantly, although if you were reading this first I don't think you'd struggle with it being the end of a series.
Thoroughly recommend - along with the rest of the series!

Three and a half stars.

The fifth and final book in the series about the Callaghan sisters turns to the youngest, Lucy. Lucy, I'll be honest, has not been my favourite character in this series, she's loud, brash, sweary, promiscuous, and lacking in basic social niceties. A budding actress she makes do by working as a Disney Princess at children's parties, waitressing and tending bar. At thirty years old she's still living in a flat share/commune, no significant other, and no career.

Then a freak accident involving a costume, a hired bicycle and a collision with a double decker bus lands Lucy in hospital. She wakes with amnesia thinking she's only seventeen years old, with dreams of marring her boyfriend and having a couple of kids.

As Lucy struggles to marry up her memories of over ad ecade ago with today's realities she tries to reach out to people in her past to understand how she got to where she is.

For me the earlier books were more romance driven whereas the last 2/3 have been women's fiction. In this book we see how Lucy might see herself as a failure when compared to her sisters, but they value her for her honesty, her bravery, and her commitment. I have to say, I still don't really love Lucy but I do like her a lot more now.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

Am I Allergic to Men?
Kristen Bailey

A hilarious, relatable and a great read.
The writing was fun and enjoyable throughout the entire story.
Writing was fabulous, gripping and so lovely with varied characters.
The plot was interesting and kept me engaged with a smile plastered on my face.
The cast of supporting characters was also an interesting. And .are the book that much more interesting.
This story is quite sweet and warm-hearted.
I genuinely loved this book.
You'll instantly love it.

Genre• Romance
Expected Pub Date• February 3, 2022

5 out 5 rating system
Quality Of Writing• 4
Plot Development• 4
Characterization• 4
Ease Of Reading• 4
Enjoyability• 4
Overall Rating• 4.5

Bookouture,
Thank You for your generosity and gifting me a copy of this amazing eARC!
I will post my review closer to pub date.

Thank you to Bookouture and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Am I Allergic to Men? by Kristen Bailey is a rom-com that will appeal to fans of the movies 13 Going on 30 and Bridesmaids. The story revolves around Lucy, who works as a for-hire Disney princess for children's birthday parties. While running/riding to work one day, she's the victim of a tragic accident, which results in her going into a coma. When she wakes up, she realizes that she's lost her memories from the last 10 years. She thinks she's 17, but in reality, she's 27. Will Lucy be able to fill in the gaps?

Here is a humorous excerpt from Chapter 1:

"‘Stickers are for babies! I don’t want your stickers.’
When is it acceptable to drop kick a child? This one is about eight. I don’t think I’d be able to kick him very far but he stands in front of me, pigeon puff to his chest, hands on his hips and a look on his face that you know he’s had since birth. I don’t understand why I’m on this planet? It’s cold. It was warmer in my mum, put me back. I bet he stares at broccoli like this or when he opens a Christmas present with the wrong price tag. This isn’t real Lego, Mother! You can tell he’s a reluctant party guest too. This woman before me is also not a real princess. She is an imposter. She told me her dress was sewn by woodland creatures and fairyland magic. It’s quite blatantly from Amazon. His mum is the slim one in the sports gear and the Louis Vuitton tote bag who showed up with a green smoothie."

Overall, Am I Allergic to Men? is a rom-com that relies on a lot of outrageous and rather crass humor. When I read the synopsis, I was excited to read this book and find out about Lucy's journey to recover her memories and find out what she's been doing for the past 10 years. I took off 2 stars though, because I just wasn't a fan of the author's sense of humor. I wouldn't consider myself a prude, but the constant talk about sex and sex-related items got old fast. If you're intrigued by the excerpt above, or if you're a fan of rom-coms, you can check out this book when it comes out in February!

**spoiler alert** I'm going to actually try and review a book for real this time because it's brand new and deserves it. It's probably far too detailed and that's why I'm marking it 'spoilers,' but I tried to keep it at least slightly vague.

First and foremost, I picked this at random because the title sounded like a fun brand of humor (and also “Dorito enthusiast,” hi nice to meet you, I am same) and had no idea it was actually book 5 in a series until I finished it. Even so, I thoroughly felt like I got to know each of the characters even without reading their backstories, so I wasn't irritated or confused at any point. On Emma’s divorce and Grace’s becoming a widow, I got enough details to be satisfied while it also left enough open to create intrigue, which was a clever way of making me consider her other books without leaving glaring gaps that make people annoyed or stupid for not paying attention to the order.

On that note, we were learning Lucy’s history with her as it came back in memories, which was a neat take on recapping a reader on previous books. It was a vastly refreshing twist on the usual info dumping authors generally use for sequels in case people didn’t read the previous. It's also in first-person omniscient, which I tend not to like, so it took some getting used to in the beginning. I also feel like if Lucy's memory is full of blanks, she wouldn't easily be able to read her family and friends, but then again she still retained about 18 years of knowledge and that's probably at least helpful enough to take a best guess. Still, I'm not a fan of narrators mind-reading, but I also know it might be the best way to get other opinions/viewpoints into what's otherwise a one-POV storyline.

Also refreshing was how none of my predictions came true. I’ve never been great at predicting books, so if *I* can see something coming, it’s pretty glaringly obvious. The little mystery sprinkled into the novel early on (and the mystery was NOT how she lost her memory) first seemed like the obvious reveal of a date with a boyfriend and I was fully expecting disappointment. Around midway, I got this brilliant idea that I was SURE would be the big reveal, especially when I googled a random fact and learned the dates matched up almost perfectly.

I was again so very wrong. Just like how my initial assumption was that this book was going to be some sappy romance novel where she loses her memory and then kisses the love of her life and suddenly it all comes flashing back like a boomerang. Yawwwwwn. Also how does that even work scientifically? A flood of oxytocin triggers a burst of neurons to start firing off like, well, fireworks, in her brain and suddenly her memories are returned?

I was pleasantly surprised that the overarching theme of the novel was familial love and also self-love and acceptance, because who needs yet another novel that ends with a girl finding her worth in a boy? It’s lame, it’s tired, it’s stale. Not this book.

Granted, the book isn’t perfect. For one, there was literally one mention of Doritos in the entire book. But okay, okay, that’s not a reason to knock off a star. I was also prepared to hate the book from the get-go because I hated teenage Lucy, but by the end, I realized you’re kind of supposed to? She’s very annoying and self-obsessed and exactly the reason I tend not to read books about teenagers because I just hate how they’re usually portrayed. Fortunately, we only had about a chapter of that and then we moved on and had a bus-load (heh) of character development and I ended up coming around to Lucy's character.

It helps that she adopted a very unadoptable kitty sidekick and also I’m a sucker for an Awesome Aunt/Uncle who works well with kids both related and unrelated to her. Lucy’s also a kick-ass, outspoken feminist who’s very (very) sex-positive and modern in her ideals and beliefs, which is another thing I haven’t read much of. She walks into a room like she owns it and makes sure everyone knows she's there, and I think we can all use a dash of that confidence.

Also, although I’m not too knowledgeable on the science of amnesia, I will admit part of that star came off because at the beginning of the book, it was hard to grapple with how it was acting on her brain. A quick Google search assures me it’s entirely possible to happen the way it did for Lucy— and they did explain it by the end of the book, which is good for people who don’t like being left hanging, you know? But I kept wondering in the beginning, “it seems odd she remembers this and not that”, but everyone’s experience could be different and it’s also a book, so a little belief is meant to be suspended.

I will say, throughout the whole book, I was hard-pressed to find the title inside it. Like the title made me think this was going to be a girl going through a long line of men trying to find “the one” but with some sarcasm and snark to go with it, and if not for the description, I probably wouldn’t have read this book. Also, she’s not really hunting for the one at the forefront of her mind; it’s more about literally and figuratively finding herself and coming to terms with who she is and has become since being a teenager. She might grapple with being different from her sisters who took ‘more traditional’ paths in the marriage and family way, but I think the title detracts from the main point of the novel. But don’t ask me to come up with a better one because I have several untitled works sitting on my hard drive because it’s surprisingly very damn hard titling things. Also I realized the title fits in well with her sisters' books, so that works.

All in all, I’d say it’s worth a read, especially if you also appreciate your family (or maybe need to do it a little more), and/or need a good laugh from the antics of someone doing it much worse than you are at the opening of the book. I definitely found a little of myself in Lucy, not so much all the fun aforementioned parts, but more the "I have no idea where I'm going" part. It was nice to see her figure herself out and even better, do it without enlisting a male-- or even female-- companion other than her family and a few key friends.

It took me about 4 days to finish, so it definitely wasn’t hard to get through. It certainly kept me entertained. It might be a little bit of a cheeseball story, but I prefer a cheesy family story to cheesy romance story, so I’ll take it, especially since that big twist wasn’t anywhere near as cheesy as I expected it to be.

This is a story about a girl named Lucy. She is on her way to the next gigs as Elsa. On her way there she gets hit by a bus and doesn’t remember anything from the last ten years. She starts to meet up with people from her past to see if she can trigger her memory.