I've been in a reading slump, y'all. It happens to me occasionally (though in fact it's more that I get burned out on a particular type of media, e.g., audiobooks, books, TV shows, movies, and need to switch off to another format for a bit), but it was especially disappointing this time because there was a lot of Life Stress™ that I would normally keep at bay with a tidy little romance to escape into.

I found out about this book via a friend (via Booktok), who described it as "a sapphic romance with no third-act breakup." Hello, yes, please! (We'll cautiously skirt around the fact that Monica McCallan's wife, Haley Cass, wrote the same book because they're both good and if the straights can do it, why can't the queers?)

Plus, I am the world's biggest sucker for fake-dating. As someone who struggles with intimacy even trying to make friends (and who secretly believes that I'd have a much better success ratio if people were forced to interact with me over a long enough period to acclimate to my eccentricities), I deeply enjoy tales of two people forced together by happenstance who learn to enjoy the other's company.

It's not that there's no conflict in this book. To the contrary, there's plenty - the dynamic between main character Sydney and her ex-fiancee Grant (Devereux); the other female main Reese and her brother Grant; Reese and her father, Tripp. There's plenty of juice for the squeezing as events play themselves out.

Also, I very much appreciated how fleshed-out the side plots were. We got full character arcs for Reese's mother, Grant's new fiancee (Brynn Fitzpatrick), and even the Devilish Devereux Duo get a decent comeuppance. (And the schaudenfreude in that is delicious. Try it with a nice edible, it pairs very well.)

I might quibble a teensy bit with the contrivances required to keep the fires of passion smouldering without letting them ignite ... while also being aware that we're already removing one of the central tentpoles of the genre, so other peccadilloes must necessarily be played up in response.

I will admit to being over toxic masculinity in all its various forms. Though I also recognize that it's very much a part of everyday life, much as my "head-in-the-liggabutta-books-where-inexplicably-absolutely-everyone-is-at-least-a-little-bit-bi" hates to admit it.

The Devereux men are truly heinous in multiple ways, though it's tempered by the off-setting (if bordering-on-unbelievable) family dynamics of the Fitzpatricks. Or maybe it's just been too long with Awful Men Running Everything and so seeing a man with wealth depicted as loving and kind seemed hard to believe? Ugh, sadly possible. #EatTheRich

Overall, though, the book is a fascinating depiction of two adults who fall in love, talk to each other and work through things together. It's very much an enjoyable read and, perhaps, soon won't seem quite so groundbreaking? After all, the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park blew everyone's minds because we hadn't seen that kind of realistic CG in use before; nowadays, everyone uses CG so those dinosaurs seem, well, ancient. We can only hope that more romance stories are told with open, honest communication (and don't entirely hinge on contrived misunderstandings) to make this merely the first, not the last, of its kind.