Your rating:
An interior designer learns to rebuild her love life from the ground up with zero blueprints in this new romantic comedy by Ashley Herring Blake, author of Delilah Green Doesn't Care. For Astrid Parker, failure is unacceptable. Ever since she broke up with her fiancé a year ago, she’s been focused on her career—her friends might say she’s obsessed, but she’s just driven. When Pru Everwood asks her to be the designer for the Everwood Inn’s renovation that will be broadcasted on a popular home improvement show, Innside America, Astrid knows this is the answer to everything that is wrong with her life. It’ll be the perfect distraction from her failed love life, and her perpetually displeased mother might finally give her nod of approval. However, Astrid never planned on Jordan Everwood, Pru’s granddaughter and lead carpenter for the inn’s renovation, who despises every modern design decision Astrid makes. Jordan is determined to preserve the history of her family’s inn, particularly as the rest of her life is in shambles. When that determination turns into a little light sabotage, ruffling Astrid’s perfect little feathers, the showrunners ask them to play up the tension. But somewhere along the way, their dislike for each other turns into something quite different, and Astrid must decide what success truly means. Is she going to pursue the life that she’s expected to lead, or the one she wants?
No posts yet
Kick off the convo with a theory, question, musing, or update
Your rating:
Was it a bit cheesy? Yes! But the story was SO good. Can’t wait to read the other two books
4.5/5
I loved this book and would have whether it was a sequel or not. I thought that it did a great job of recounting the story of the first book, without overdoing it. Along those lines, I thought the inclusions of the first books main characters worked great as well!
Spoilers Below:
I loved following Astrid and Jordan's love story and thought it was unique to other things I've read. My only thought is that perhaps Astrid came to terms with her feelings a little too quickly.
I gave this book 2.5 stars. The chemistry between the two main characters was just not there and their personalities and motivations were lackluster. Astrid's relationship with her mother should have been fleshed out more, for instance, why was her mother so strict in the first place and why did she need to have so much control over Astrid? I also wasn't invested in the HGTV and home decorating scheme that Astrid and Jordan came up with. Overall, I felt like the author told us about the characters, but didn't show us much about them, which caused me to not be invested in the characters.