Just playing house 3.25⭐️ 2.5🌶️

Contemporary Romance

Dual POV

Second Chance Romance

Celebrity Romance

Forced Proximity

🏳️‍🌈 Main Character

He falls first

Caretaking

Low spice

Toronto setting

Tw: cancer, cancer gene, mastectomy, body dysmorphia, micro and macro aggressions 

I love the representation in this book! Seeing South Asian MC’s was great and is so important to the romance genre. It was so great to see the minuscule details being the cultures of the mc’s to life. The food, the family dynamics, the struggles. I adore that the book had recipes in the back!! 

This was a character central plot based mostly on the trama of the BRCA-1 gene and the FMC getting a mastectomy. The procedure was easily the main character of this book, and because of that I would call this women’s lit, more than a romance.

I feel like separately, the main characters were really well established, with real issues and flaws. But together, I found the romance to be lukewarm. But I loved how mature they were in their communication, for the most part.

The side characters were a little less established and less focused. The ADHD representation was not well done, making the hyperactivity the only personality trait of the character. This also happened with other characters singularly representing depression, criminal, narcissism. It’s almost like you could have taken their names away and just called them by their diagnosis and it would have served the plot just fine. The side characters were too flighty within the plot to for any real love for anyone… maybe this was on purpose due to the struggles of the FMC, but I would have preferred seeing that on the page rather than being told about it in an internal monologue.

I’m not a huge fan of pop culture references. With this having a celebrity as a MC, it’s more understandable… but it’s still not my favorite.

Thank you NetGalley and Forever (Grand Central Punlishing) for a eARC of this book. All opinions are my own.