My Rating: ✩✩✩✩✩
I honestly don't know if I loved or hated this book.
The writing struggles. Hopefully this is an editing issue, but some of the prose and dialog took 3-4 re-reads to actually decipher what it was saying. Following the already stilted dialog was not helped by this. The characters are not much more than archetypes: he is grumpy and stoic, she is a fragile soul hiding behind sunshine...eh, it was fine. No one grows as much as acts out of character to further the plot and honestly, neither of them are in any way prepared to have a functional relationship.
The plot is fairly obvious from the start, the only person surprised in a any way is our fair FMC. Since the book is written from her POV, mostly the book is listening to two people be mean to each other (You were enemies in college? We can tell! Stop acting like 20-year-old jerks!) while the slowest woman on the planet puts together a puzzle that has literally one piece. The grand crisis of the relationship is some nonsense that gets shoehorned in via the mechanism of FMC "forgetting until just this perfect moment" key details of a college interaction.
Now, all that said, I could not put it down. I read the entire thing in a night and could not wait to see what these two annoying people did next. The spice was grade A, Stein knows her stuff, even if it didn't make a lot of sense for the characters/chemistry/plot development. Even though I know this was not a technically great novel, somehow Stein is becoming one of my "must-read" authors...so do with that what you will!
Published on 9 April 2026 by St. Martin's Griffin
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