ALRIGHT. So overall I really liked this book and that’s largely due to the second half/last third of the book. While the insight and flashbacks were very helpful, I still will take the liberty of bitching about the way the flashbacks were set up.

I get it might be useful for some people but this is my review, dear reader, so you’re getting my opinion. Which is: You don’t have to give us the years, months AND days. For fuck’s sake it made me want to cry when it finally just whittled down to saying “three years, x months” and nothing more. I get wanting to be precise with the timeline, but the embellishments give me the impression they don’t trust me as a reader to parse that it’s starting at point A in the flashback and progressing through a natural timeline as opposed to bouncing around.

I also ended up skimming through a lot of it. Now I get what you’re probably thinking, “how can you read it like that and still like it?”

I think it’s because of the context of the romance books-to-on-screen-adaptations pipeline. Obviously Ali’s books are being turned into movies and that’s amazing. Love that for her. But sometimes I get the feeling that books were made specifically in mind to be turned into adaptations on screen. Again, great, I love to see people getting their flowers (maybe also look to POC authors works a little more though, hm?) but plain and simple there was a lot of dialogue in between expositional paragraphs so sometimes I just skipped to the dialogue. Which made it very easy for me to picture this as a screen adaptation. Was that the goal? Maybe, maybe not.

As for the cast of characters: I liked a lot of them and didn’t care about some of them. Mainly the wedding party. I lost track of who knew who, but they made for great background characters to flesh out the story a little more.

Rue needs to be my friend immediately.

The Age Gap: I actually really liked how Ali approached this. There was consent along the way, ALL throughout the book, and I liked that she made it very clear it was about Maya’s autonomy and her knowing her own mind, but Conor still made it clear there were power imbalances they needed to acknowledge. Was it realistic, when talking about a privileged white guy with as fucked up a past as Conor? Maybe not, but then again we don’t turn to romance books to accurately represent real life men do we? He is Irish, so maybe that’s something cultural I’m not picking up on.

Regardless I enjoyed their dynamic and how Ali went about setting up their relationship and didn’t shy away from the obvious.

Was this the best romance book ever? I don’t think so. Will I read this again? I’m not sure but it’s not as high up on my list as other books.

All in all, I still had fun, plus I have a soft spot for Italy so it was lovely picturing the setting.