This was great! It did two things I’m obsessed with:

❤️ It pushed a friends-to-lovers storyline to its angstiest, messiest limits. You name it, we had it: friends with benefits fails, unhealthy amounts of pining, and not being able to make up their minds between doing everything together or moving to a different city just to get away from each other. Add in some ‘I need to move in with you temporarily because my apartment flooded’ and bam, THE MESS. I was entertained 😆

❤️ It gave these characters some compelling flaws. Yes, our hero was a conscientious sweetheart, but he was also an overthinking doormat. And our heroine was a coolly chaotic independent woman, but she was also a self-sabotaging man eater. And I loved the way the romance plot specifically forced them to grow as characters.

It had flashbacks, which I love in a many-years-long messy friends-to-lovers journey. And the audiobook was great (if you’re like me and your mind doesn’t immediately populate with ideas when the heroine’s voice gets compared to Joanna Lumley, then I’d recommend this audio 😆)

There were a few little things that kept this from perfect, though. The bossy-boots (him) and brat (her) thing felt a bit… forced? I spent way too much time rereading sections of the book because I couldn’t decide if this dynamic was awkward because a) it didn’t make sense with their personalities or b) this kink-adjacent language felt weird in their conversations as friends. Maybe both? Maybe just the latter? I can’t decide.

And for all the flashbacks and on-page forced proximity, I don’t know if we ever fully took off from Instalove-Landia Airport… but I’m so picky about this in a friends to lovers story—take that with a grain of salt.