eARC PROVIDED BY PENGUIN & NETGALLEY
UK RELEASE DATE – 18 JULY 2024
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ stars
❤️🔥Open Door romance (18+)
❤️ Romantic Fiction
📖Contemporary Fiction
❗Trigger warnings1
My Top Must Read Romance for July!
“My wedding is next weekend, and you and Eli are about to spend nine days together.”
I loved this, I completely binged this story and couldn’t stop. This is the romance that will make you fall in love with second chance love stories.
This story brought the entire arc of a great romance; the pining, the angst and characters that you become invested in and root for.
This is a second chance romance and it is not the genre that I typically reach for but this one changes my outlook on the trope. I greatly enjoyed that the story chose to have the characters be complicated personalities without the push for their characters to fit into tidier and neater boxes. I find that with some second chance romances that the main male lead is miraculously a new person without any substance, however I adored that, as a reader, we see a greater development with the characters acknowledging previous actions and the aim to better their previous mistakes.
The romance, itself, was super enjoyable to read. The build-up, tension and pining built up slowly and deliciously. It allowed for the readers to witness the chemistry between the two created through the past and the current moments. I didn’t find the pining and the ‘will they, won’t they’ frustrating as the decisions of characters were explained well and as a reader it was easy to understand the hesitations. The story also allowed for sadness, and tugs at heartstrings which further allows for a greater depth in the story and romance making it not just a one dimensional main character romance.
The story outside of the romantic leads was also nice to follow along, it allowed for fun interactions and dialogue with side characters. It allowed for good foundations of the main leads’ relationships with other characters.
Overall, a 5 star romance read that manages to bring its reader on an emotional and romantic journey.
Book Synopsis
Georgia Woodward lives by her lists, none more so than the one about her ex, Eli Mora. It’s full of the ironclad dos and don’ts they’ve been following since she returned to the Bay Area after their cataclysmic breakup five years ago.
With the wedding of their mutual best friend, Adam, looming, and them about to step into their roles as best woman and man, Georgia’s never needed it more. She refuses to threaten their tight-knit friend group with her messy—and still very present—feelings. The rules on that list will keep her cool, calm, and compartmentalized.
What’s not on her list? Eli arriving from New York with a new rule-breaking attitude or the all-inclusive venue burning to the ground, leaving the bride and groom in dire straits. Nor does she anticipate Adam asking her and Eli to help him make a miracle happen. Together.
As Georgia and Eli rush up to Napa Valley to pull off the perfect wedding, their old chemistry comes back in technicolor. Somewhere between cake tastings gone wrong, disastrous DJ auditions, and Eli’s heated attention, Georgia starts recognizing the man she fell in love with before. And if she lets herself break her rules, she might find what they’re building isn’t the something old that ruined them—it’s a chance at something new.
- mental health ↩︎
Dee's TBR 
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