I had a rough time with this book, which is not usually true when I read Abby Jimenez. She has written some of my favorite romance books, and she always manages to write sweeping love stories that emotionally wreck me before my heart is put back together at the end.


I read several other early reviews, and I seem to be in the minority, but I was very frustrated the majority of the time I was reading this book. 

I loved the characters. Briana and Jacob both went on journeys throughout this book, and I loved how they grew and changed. The mental health rep in this book was amazing, and I especially liked Jacob's journey with his anxiety. I loved the development of their relationship from pretending to date to slowly falling for each other. It was sweet, and the letter writing was very very cute.

I also know from the author's note at the end of the book that this was an extremely personal book for Jimenez to write. The whole subplot of Briana's brother dealing with an unexpected autoimmune disease that leads to kidney failure is directly taken from her own life.

There are so many of this parts of this book that I loved. So why am I giving it 3.5 stars? Because of the miscommunication trope that is threaded through a good third (or maybe even half) of the book. 

I'm hiding this chunk for spoilers, even though most of what I say is pretty vague. Proceed at your own risk.

There are two huge miscommunications/misunderstandings, one from Briana and one from Jacob where they both make HUGE assumptions about something with only part of the information. And then neither of them talks to the other about it! They spend so much time assuming they know how the other one feels and they're both completely wrong, and they don't talk about it until everything has fallen apart. It's extremely frustrating that characters who are in their 30's (they're both 35 if I remember correctly) spend so much time assuming they know what the other person is thinking instead of taking two minutes to have a conversation about something to clear the air. And the part that's so frustrating is that these misunderstandings are so SILLY. And multiple times Briana flat out refuses to listen to Jacob and let him explain what is actually going on because she is SO SURE that she knows how he actually feels. I know this has to do with past trauma (which she eventually does address and deal with), but the fact that the major conflict in this book revolves around frankly ridiculous miscommunications is incredibly frustrating. There's no real reason these two people can't be together except their sheer stubbornness and refusal to be honest with each other.

It's disappointing that there was so much about this book that I loved but the entire miscommunication thing really ruined my enjoyment of the book. (As you can tell, I'm not a fan of that trope because it's always silly and easily resolved.) I feel like for the heaviness and seriousness of the rest of the plot, that really didn't fit in, and I wasn't a fan of how either character dealt with it.

It might be a little harsh, but I have given the majority of Abby Jimenez's books 5 stars and I know she can write really amazing stories. This one just didn't do it for me, and I'm pretty disappointed that this one plot point kind of sucked all the joy out of the whole book for me.