Reviews

Single POV - my favourite! Sadly this book fell a bit flat for me, especially at the end.

I love to see a tattooed FMC who loves metal music and does weight lifting (maybe because that's me??). Don't have enough punk rock girls OR built girls outside of rock band romance novels.

John was such a sweet cinnamon roll as well, really liked him and the contrast between his very masculine job and him still being a nice guy that is quite gentle and a little unsure.

I also liked that the BFF was a successful woman & queer.

The writing is generally quite choppy though and it was sometimes a bit difficult to follow what was going on. It made some of the later interactions between the MCs a bit awkward but then I kind of liked that too in some of the dialogues. It was refreshing that the FMC was so awkward and weird and clueless in a relatable way.

That said, editing definitely needs improving. Aside from some typos and grammatical errors sometimes the interactions / dialogues throughout were a bit strange at times and really disjointed. And it seemed to get worse towards the end of the book.

Below sections of the review contains spoilers:

I struggled with the scene with the brother for example. It was really hard to understand what was going on (was he high? Or not? So John knew him? Awkward horney thoughts in between dealing with high (or not) brother?)

Also, aside from her thinking he burned down her store (but then he didn't) no more follow up happened really. Felt like a plot hole to me.

I am also not a huge fan of the narrative that a woman needs a man to be fulfilled. Which this was kind of set up to be, that she needed to change herself to be more attractive to men and also wasn't complete without a man. I know this is the whole concept of romance, but I like my women to be okay without a guy and him just being the cherry on top.

Also didn't like FMC having quite strong prejudice towards "Tech nerds" and saying they are all unkempt, porn watching, WoW playing bores. She seems to have made that experience but that's quite harsh and not true in reality from my experience. I know it was serving the plot, but still - leave the poor nerds alone! 😜

A few things that niggled at me as well:

- after the brother incident the author makes a point that the MCs still hadn't exchanged phone numbers and a paragraph later he texts her?

- when they are in the greasy spoon restaurant after the gym session he says he remembers her from high school, but they never explain what he remembers

- the first sex scene. Wasn't the best I ever read and her coming I think 7 times? A bit much ...

I did like a few things though:

- I liked that John was super respectful and actually didn't pull any alpha shit - hence why he was so confused by Em's mixed signals. She was being a little annoying tbh and he just respected when she gave him 'not interested ' vibes and then she got angry. So props for him being a good guy and respecting boundaries that Em.jusy didn't realise she was putting in place

- the nosy towns people. I liked how they were invested and gave Em shit for being so clueless

I believe this was a debut novel and for that it could have been pretty solid for a light hearted small town romance. I just think the author would benefit from a good editor though to improve the flow of her writing (especially dialogues)and remove those typos and errors which can be quite distracting when reading. In the end I skipped through the last 20% because it was just all so choppy and disjointed. The writing distracted from what wasn't a bad plot and characters.