This book definitely felt like a second act, much more so than the sequel romances in these sorts of series often are. While normally I’d say you could read these sorts of series out of order, I really wouldn’t recommend it here, as it certainly feels way more interconnected than other romance series, and the understanding of the setting does strongly come from the first book rather than this one. I think this may have also contributed a bit to why I didn’t like this book quite as much as the first, since we didn’t really have as much of a strong connection to the town and the setting itself, since that groundwork was already done. And while it hadn’t been that long since I’d read the first book, it’d been long enough that I never really got that connection back from just reading this book.

Additionally, since you lose a lot of the scene set-up, more space is left for the actual relationship and character building. Normally, this is a fantastic thing, as it allows room for you to get more attached to the characters and get a stronger feel for the relationship, but this book almost suffered for it. Instead of taking the space to add more nuance, we instead see the same thoughts and arguments rehashed over and over again, and while sometimes progress is made, it’s really frustrating. The same string of thoughts have to be had 10 times in a section before that little smidge of progress is made, and it honestly got really tiring. It felt like I was hearing the same thing over and over again, and in this book where the main issues stopping the relationship are largely self-imposed (or require both characters to just take the step and try), it doesn’t feel productive to run in circles so much before that step is finally taken. It was almost too realistic, instead of enjoyable as a romance to read. I also just didn’t feel for the pairing as strongly as I did for the first book, which was unfortunate because I did really like these two as side characters!

Overall, this was still a fun book though, and I can definitely see myself reading more by this author in the future! This one just wasn’t entirely for me, unfortunately, though I can see it still working for many!