I will start by saying that Zora, her best friend Emma, and Granny are wonderful characters and have a special bond that I loved reading. Though it doesn’t seem like it at first, Reid is amazing and I always loved when he was on the scene. There are other things I really enjoyed about this story that I’ll be discussing as I go along, but there were things that also didn’t work for me.

My biggest issue with this book is its pacing. The chapters are on the long side and since the two MMCs aren’t introduced until the third chapter, it seemed like a long wait to meet them. Not that they’re the focus of this story. The focus is very firmly on Zora and we only get her POV. I generally like multiple POV books, but the single POV worked here. What didn’t work was the continuity. There are a lot of unneeded details and meandering text that overburdened this book. If you’re not going to edit out those unnecessary bits, at least make sure they are adding up and make sense. Thankfully, these weren’t things that changed the storyline. But they were noticeable and distracting.

Zora is a strong, brilliant, compassionate black woman in many ways. That’s why it was hard for me to understand how she didn’t figure out what was bothering her about Reid and Lawrence. It’s very obvious and when she does figure it out, her character seemed to change before my eyes. I felt she became selfish in the way she handled the situation and her expectations from both men. Especially the one she was closer to.

I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me that this book would be a love triangle. That’s not my favorite thing, but it didn’t bother me here because the author did a fantastic job of approaching the triangle in a very mature way. Everyone in the triangle was well aware of the situation and on board with exploring feelings before any commitments were made. My only problem with this is I strongly preferred one paramour over the other and didn’t understand why Zora wasn’t thinking the same way I was, and that’s a me problem.

There weren’t really fireworks in this book. As I mentioned earlier, this story is more focused on Zora and her journey than the men. I don’t love that Granny has tunnel vision about great-grandbabies, it gets to be a bit much. I honestly wasn’t all in on Zora even wanting a relationship when she first started dating these men. It seemed much more a by-product of the nagging she got from Emma and Granny. But one of the men did lift Zora up and support her in a way that there was a true partnership that I liked.

I want to end on a positive note. When the dialogue was between the friends and more of the chit-chat variety as opposed to lengthy explanations Zora is giving one of her gentleman suitors it was so fun and realistic. This is how I hear real people talking with their friends, the wording and cadence. Spot on.

This story was not bad by any means. But it also didn’t live up to my expectations. It had so much potential.

**I received an ARC of this book courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher. All opinions expressed in this review are my own and given freely**

You can find an excerpt from this book on my blog, All In Good Time.

i thought this book had potential. but unfortunately for me, it just wasn't executed well. i always find the setting of a bookstore, or a character being involved in the literary world fun to read about, because of my own interest in the area, so it did score some points for that. with regards to the actual romance, however, things went downhill. with BOTH love interests, the author kept insisting there was so much tension between zora and the mmcs, but i didn't pick up on any - SHOW me how there's tension and yearning, don't just tell me there is and move on. she had already gotten together with boh of them at least once by the 100-page mark, and so the rest of it kinda just felt like we were waiting for her to make her mind up. i also guessed the 'plot twist' quite early on, and it kinda wasn't even resolved??