I love Kennedy Ryan, but this was not my favorite of hers or the Hoops series. I don’t know if it’s because I listened to it instead of reading the book like the others in the series, but this just didn’t feel like that great of a match of characters.

I wanted to love this book, but admittedly settled for just liking it, and just barely.

I liked the character, but honestly, I liked Tuesday and Ms. Della more than Ricki and Ezra.

The romance was great, once the book finally got there, but I do wish it didn’t take up to 50% of the book for that to finally happen.

And here’s the piece that took me so long to read and really engage with this book—the magic realism of it all. I’m a fan of fantasy and even romantasy, but if I’m being honest, this story didn’t need that and I wonder if it would have been better without it. While I appreciated the background of Harlem history, dark voodoo, and Ezra’s family, it just felt like too much trying to happen at once to make that part of the story “make sense.” That part was also why I didn’t enjoy Kennedy Ryan’s Block Shot.

At any rate, the writing itself was beautiful and I don’t want to take that away from the book at all. I just wish I loved it more.

3.5 ⭐️s

First things first - Julia is the absolute worst and I realize I shouldn’t be surprised because “like mother, like daughter,” but seriously, her character was horrible. I tried to like her, but when she told Alice that William was dead, that was the last straw for me.

What a raw and emotionally draining story of broken people trying to navigate the world and find love in their adult relationships. Naturally, my heart broke for William early on and honestly, I did not like him getting with Julia as I saw how controlling she was and realized she was not at all interested in him, but in the idea of what he meant for her in her plan of life. I wasn’t surprised that they didn’t work out, but I was shocked at just how broken he was during the moment of his leaving her and Alice/suicide attempt.

I think if anything, this just highlighted the complexities of those close sibling/familial relationships and the impact it has on the people who marry into the family. At some point, it gets to be too much for everyone and ends in that inevitable boundary setting that you see all of the characters go through, but in the end, they all find themselves together again.