Publication Date: June 20, 2023
A delightful rom-com about a woman who decides to revisit each of her seven exes, convinced that one of them is “the one who got away.”
Seven Exes. Seven Missed Chances. Who was the one who got away?
Esther is nearing thirty, with a great job and a flat she shares with her two best friends, Bibi and Louise. But her life is missing that special someone. Tired of being single and sick of bad date after bad date, she thinks she’s found the answer to her romance problem in an old women’s magazine.
According to the magazine’s dating column, there are seven archetypes a woman will date before finding Mr. Right. It all seems silly at first, until Esther realizes she has exactly seven exes that match the profiles: The First Love, The Work Mistake, The Overlap, The Friend with Benefits, The Missed Chance, The Bastard, and The Serious One. Is it so hard to believe that perhaps one of them is The One?
Deciding she must have left her true love in the reject pile, Esther contacts each of her old boyfriends. But finding her soulmate isn’t as simple as she hoped it would be. Madness, mayhem, laughs, and tears ensue as she valiantly works her way through her past love life and faces up to her previous mistakes. It’s an odyssey of the heart that will teach her a lot about herself . . . and just might lead her to the man of her dreams.
Seven Exes is a British romantic comedy by author by Lucy Vine with an interesting premise.
Esther Adams is twenty-nine years old and is feeling the pressure to find “The One.” While bemoaning her fate with her best friends Bibi and Louise, Esther discovers a magazine article that identifies “The Seven Relationships Every Woman Has in Her Quest to Find the One.” Esther realizes that she has had all seven relationships and decides that one of them was probably “The One,” but she let him go. What ensues is Esther’s search for the seven exes and her attempt to find the right guy from among them.
Handling Esther’s pursuit of seven ex-boyfriends is an ambitious job for author Lucy Vine. The resultant book is long (over 400 pages) and somewhat difficult to follow. The chapters jump between three scenarios: Esther’s previous encounters with an ex, the three friends talking at a bar, and Esther’s current interactions with the ex. And this repeats for all seven exes.
The relationship between the three friends is the strength of the story. Their discussions are clever and funny. The book is definitely a romantic comedy, but it felt like a women’s fiction novel as well, with three women!
The story centers around Esther, but Bibi and Louise are essential characters. All three characters showed significant personal growth.
I enjoyed the book, but I found the jumping from chapter to chapter to be distracting and a bit overwhelming. There were too many plots and subplots to manage effectively. The author had a great idea, but it may have been a bit too big to carry it off successfully.
Seven Exes is loaded with charm, and while billed as a romance, the book’s true strength comes from the friends’ relationship. 
Lucy Vine is a writer, editor and the bestselling author of Hot Mess, What Fresh Hell, Are We Nearly There Yet? and Bad Choices. Her books have been translated into sixteen languages around the world, with Hot Mess optioned for a TV series. She has been nominated twice for the Comedy Women In Print Award and hosts the podcast and live event series Hot Mess Clubhouse, celebrating funny women. Her journalism has appeared in international publications, including Grazia, Stylist, heat, Fabulous, New, Now, Marie Claire, Glamour Online, Cosmopolitan, The Daily Telegraph, The Sun, and The Mirror. She lives in Cambridgeshire.
