Trigger Warning:
Revelation of a character being sexually assaulted (nothing graphic, just remembered and talked about)
Parent diagnosed with cancer



After finishing this book earlier today, my immediate reaction was that it was a 3-star book. After letting it sit in my brain for awhile, I think it's much closer to a 2 than a 3.

First, the good. I generally liked the progression of the story, up until the ending. It's definitely a slow-burn as far as the relationship goes, and I think that makes sense. Our heroine has just gotten out of a relationship she's been in for nearly 20 years. She's not thinking about jumping into another relationship for most of the book. For the most part, the pacing worked for me, but I was okay with it being more about her own self-discovery than a straight-up romance.
Also, for those who get squeamish at reading sex scenes (they usually don't bother me, but I know some people don't like them) this only really has one right near the end of the book and it's fade to black. For me, I would've liked a little more romance and sexy tension...but that's me.

Now for the not-so-good.
A little over half-way through the book, our heroine remembers that one of her father's friends inappropriately touched her when she was a child, and apparently she'd repressed it until she saw him at her father's wedding reception. This whole sequence of events just struck me as really rushed and awkwardly handled. It feels like it's very casually talked about between Laurie and Jamie and later on Laurie and her mother, and then it's just forgotten about and not brought up again for the rest of the story. It doesn't seem to have any long-term effect at all on her except for getting her to see that her father was a trash can of a human being who put her in a position of being hurt by his friend because he was too busy being a self-centered asshole.

I also thought Jamie's father having inoperable cancer seemed like a plot device introduced to get Laurie to go home with Jamie. It had absolutely no bearing on anything else that was happening, and for the most part the characters didn't even mention that it was a thing.

Then there's a scene in the latter half of the book where one of her friend's calls her and says that a man she hooked up with on a dating app vandalized her apartment. She talks about their date, and how he was a jerk to her all night and that even when they slept together he was kind of mean about it, and then vandalized her walls using tomatoes. It seemed like it would've been a moment to weave in a little dialogue about being careful with meeting strangers online, but instead it's again not treated, in my mind, with the severity of the situation. In the end they devise a sort of lame practical joke to play on this man and the whole incident is played as a bonding moment between these women. It just struck me as a very strange reaction to something that is really disturbing.

To be honest, while I enjoyed the set up for this book (fake dating, stuck in an elevator, only one bed...some of my favorite rom-com tropes) I thought it fell apart a little near the end. I didn't get the sense that Laurie and Jamie felt any particularly strong attraction to one another, and then BAM! They're in love. The very end was just really out of left field. She proposes to him after just a couple of weeks of actual dating, and they're kind of like, "Yeah, we're not really on the same page about what we want out of life, and we might decide in a couple years that we want completely different things, but sure! Why not!! At least we'll have a fun two years!" Seriously, what? That's paraphrasing, but it's pretty close to their final conversation. And then the book just ends.

I've also seen some reviewers talk about the fact that the diversity in this book felt a little forced, as if the author was trying to meet some sort of quota, and said that the fact that Laurie was mixed race didn't seem to really inform on her character in a way it may have if this had been an own voices story. As a white woman, I can't really speak to that, but I thought I would bring it up for people potentially looking at this book for POC rep.

There are so many moments and lines in this book that I really enjoyed, and I could absolutely see myself reading another of this author's books in the future, but this one just didn't quite work for me.