First of all, I really appreciate the author’s note at the beginning that talks about Allison and her relationship to her body as a fat woman, etc. I think it’s really important in a book with a marginalized main character that will involve trauma involving that marginalization to add info to prepare the reader and I appreciate that the author did so here.

That said, this book was so much fun! I always love a second chance romance, but I do get nervous when the original romance had been toxic, which seemed to be the case with our two main characters here. I think it’s really easy for characters to fall back into that toxicity and it not to be addressed as a problem by the author. SO MANY ROMANCES come across as super toxic from an outside perspective, and I was really worried that was going to happen here. However, Lowe did a great job of towing the line in a way that acknowledged when something was bad so that it could get fixed. There was also a lot of time spent away from the romance between Allison and Colin, so the reader got to experience Allison’s life outside of just that one person. From her complicated relationship with her best friend and her parents to her trying to establish a place in her grad program and cohort, Allison felt like a well-rounded character. The competition aspect between her and Colin had a good balance of being fun to read while also making me nervous as to how it’d impact their relationship with one another. I laughed, I cried, and at the end I was so glad that I had the chance to read it!