Fool Me Once (Fool Me Once #1)
Ashley Winstead
Lee Stone is a twenty-first-century woman: she kicks butt at her job as a communications director at a women-run electric car company (that’s better than Tesla, thank you) and after work she is “Stoner,” drinking guys under the table and never letting any of them get too comfortable in her bed… That’s because Lee’s learned one big lesson: never trust love. After four major heartbreaks set her straight, from her father cheating on her mom all the way to Ben Laderman in grad school—who wasn’t actually cheating, but she could have sworn he was, so she reciprocated in kind. Then Ben shows up five years later, working as a policy expert for the most liberal governor in Texas history, just as Lee is trying to get a clean energy bill rolling. Things get complicated—and competitive as Lee and Ben are forced to work together. Tension builds just as old sparks reignite, fanning the flames for a romantic dustup the size of Texas.
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0CW: Infidelity, parents' divorce, parental death, alcohol abuse
I had high but cautious hopes for Fool Me Once, given the deserved popularity of Ashley Winstead's previous debut in an entirely different genre. Sure, the campus thriller was a lot of fun, but could she pull off a romcom?
Turns out she could.
Fool Me Once is fresh, funny, and, yes, romantic. There are outright shenanigans (the half marathon portion late in the book was silly and absolutely delightful to me, a person who has occasionally thought "I mean, I could probably walk that many miles, whatever") and there are deep, raw, well-earned emotions. Having read far too many romances with love interests just this side of cardboard cutouts, mere excuses for the protagonist's better developed existence, I was thrilled to find Ben just as full and believable a character as protagonist Lee, and the chemistry between them benefits from this fact.
This is a romance for the flawed, the messy, the genuinely effed-up. Lee isn't the kind of romantic heroine whose biggest flaws are working too hard or being too quirky - her flaws are absolutely, truly flaws, and she's done - and does - some horrible things. And she deserves a happily ever after just as much as anyone who's never made a major mistake in their life. She's worthy of love, and her journey toward discovering that is one well worth reading.
Thank you to NetGalley and Graydon House for the advance review copy.
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