Uhhh.. is this my favourite Felicity Niven? The childhood friends to lovers? With the bald guy?

(no shame to bald guys—I’m obsessed with the way George wasn’t your typical hottie)

This book was:
🖤 part too earnest and pure for this world
🖤 part slow motion car crash I couldn’t look away from
🖤 part forest of pining 
🖤 part RIPPING MY HEART OUT
🖤 part putting it back together 😭

I am seriously struggling to fully grasp my love for this book. I mean, I love this author and hoped this could be in maybe my top 100 books ever… but it’s in more like my top 5?

Again, the childhood friends to lovers book??

(which is such a risky trope for me, very prone to containing my bookish pet peeves. Particularly no on-page falling in love, just lazily grandfathered-in affection from another timeline. Also annoying kid MCs and nonsensical non-conflict.)

But this book was incredible!! It had conflict. And angst for days. If I’m going to do childhood friends to lovers, I want it to be like THIS. Awkward as F. And filled to the brim with character arcs and growing pains.

I think it was the character arcs that did it for me. The sex lessons were fun, the ‘she’s engaged to someone else’ created drama-lama, certain events (and there were many) had me INVESTED.

But the character arcs launched this book into god-tier. We had a whole Hegelian dialectic going on in here. George was too "being-for-itself” (too rigid, too self-referential), Phoebe was too “being-for-another" (too unsure, too de-centered), they grew, it was everything (aka “being-in-and-for-itself” aka das Absolute)

This book was SERIOUSLY GOOD. And it made me cry. And the good-book-haze it put me in was so obvious to everyone around me that my husband is binging Felicity Niven’s backlist so that he’ll be all caught up when this comes out.

I’m so happy that I received this ARC!