Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a free eARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I thought that Open House was an extremely cute and steamy read. I straddled the fence on how I felt about it overall though. The meet cute between the two characters was just as cute as you would hope and the steamy bits were....whew. Yes! They were just as hot as I had hoped (and been promised) without them feeling too trashy or degrading, which can happen sometimes with novellas and sex scenes. This had both enemy to lovers and slightly slow burn feels. You could tell immediately that both characters were attracted to one another, but considering they were on opposite sides of the fence here (or garden I suppose) they refused to act on it until about halfway through the book. I wouldn't classify this as instalove since the good amount of time passes through the novel, even if we don't realize it at first. Their interactions were cute and I loved the old ladies in the garden. I also enjoyed the fact that gentrification was a big discussion within this book.

On the flip side, there seemed like there was too much going on here for a novella. There were a lot of sideplots: the selling of the house and the garden and all the background surround that, Magda's "failed" careers and issues with her sisters and mom, Magda's crotchety widowed uncle, Tyson's sister and family issues. All of these plots on there own were fine, but for a book that's less than 200 pages, it just seemed like a lot to fit in. By the time we reached the end I just wasn't invested in any of the side plots or the relationship. I think that the other sideplots would have worked out fine if there had been room to explore them in a large time frame. Also, Magda's sisters never seemed to understand what she was saying, even by the end of the story and that was the one side plot that I was actually interested in seeing resolved. There was also a really weird kitchen phone sex scene that was awkward and Magda's conversation with Tyson towards the end when he was going to move was...weird. It was instalove-esque in a story that hadn't seemed all that insta to begin with.

Overall, this was cute and I enjoyed it for the most part, I'd still recommend it, but I just think some things could've been a little better. In fact, if things had been explored a bit more, I may have loved it.