I'll take "books I've been looking forward to since they came out, but have not read because the laws governing what gets read off of my TBR are odd, intricate and, most importantly, known to no one. Not even me."
Anyway, it was exactly the beautiful ongoing hurt/comfort romance of the previous one and--since it's the same characters--a continuation of the romance between our highly strung genius and local golden retriever.
So of course it has fanfic vibes, by which I mean that the plot is taken seriously but is predominantly a vehicle for the character study and romance rather than the point of the book. And Meadows has a very keen sense of his characters and how trauma and pain curtail their choices while still making it, overall, a story about surviving and thriving rather than a story about trauma. Having said that, the number of times I did the thing where you put the book down, yell gently at the main characters because you absolutely cannot, and then immediately pick it back up again...was high.
In a good way.