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Review
4 stars!
This is a fantastic friends-to-lovers, fake relationship romance with humour, emotion, and so much heart. I did struggle with parts of the story, but I fell hard for these characters, and their fun and special relationship, and I loved this book.
Briana is the best friend of Alexis from Part of Your World. We see a little bit of Alexis and Daniel in this one, and of course Alexis is there to look out for her bestie, but this book can absolutely be read as a standalone.
Briana and Jacob do not get off to the best start. Both ER doctors, he has just started working in her hospital and she, already dealing with an imminent divorce and not in the best place emotionally, thinks he is there to steal her promotion. Jacob lives with near-crippling anxiety, and his ex-girlfriend has just gotten engaged to his brother, so he’s also not in the best frame of mind. Wanting to clear the air with his new colleague, Jacob writes Brianna a letter to get his thoughts and feelings out.
It’s the start of something special as Briana and Jacob start writing back and forth to each other, that becomes text messages and phone calls, and soon they are all up in each other’s lives, sharing breaks in the supply closet and spending time together outside of work. And when Jacob needs a pretend girlfriend to get his overprotective family off his back for his brother’s upcoming wedding, Briana volunteers to help him out.
I loved the relationship between these two. They laugh and joke, the banter is epic, and their conversations are funny and witty. They quickly grow close, and when Jacob offers to donate a kidney to Briana’s sick brother, they grow even closer. They are true soulmates with a deep connection, and they are each other’s ‘person’ in every way. And though they don’t admit it or act on it, they’ve both completely fallen for the other.
“Love shows up. That’s how you know when it’s real.”
And with all of those feelings, things got messy for me. I’m all for a slow burn, I love me some unrequited love, and watching friends slowly become more, but in this case it just dragged on for SO long! There were misunderstandings and miscommunications, and given everything that was happening between them, I could not comprehend how they didn’t know that their feelings were reciprocated. A little bit of angst is good, in this case, it was so drawn out that it just became annoying.
When the moment of realisation comes, it’s sadly underwhelming and then we get even MORE drama. It’s completely unnecessary, conflict for the sake of conflict, and doesn’t enhance the story in any way. And when the story was already kinda dragging for me, I just felt really disappointed in the stupid behaviour and wished those final few chapters never even happened.
The beginning of this book was building up to be such an amazing read. I adored Jacob from the very beginning; his vulnerabilities and the way he deals with his anxiety is beautifully written, and everything about him stole my heart. And Briana is feisty and so much fun. The family storylines were great, and I loved their crazy family members. They are perfect together, and it was set up to be such an epic romance, I feel like we just didn’t get it. The love is there, I just needed more of it, more of them together, and more happy for these two.
Started as a 5 star, drama bought it down to 3 star, Jacob bought it back up to 4 stars.