3/5. Highlights may contain spoilers. Read at your own risk.

Content Warnings for book: Cheating (not between MCs), pregnancy (epilogue)

Kink: N/A

Maybe it’s just my mood or something, but reading most of this book was sort of depressing for me. Again, it could be just because I’m basically looking for the fluffiest reads ever because the world is on fire.

Cam and Evan were cute together, don’t get me wrong! I love a friends to lovers romance and it felt like they definitely cared for each other deeply. Even without knowing much of their background as friends, the snippets we get do show the natural chemistry between them both.

Waking up married isn’t my favorite trope but it wasn’t overdone here — the MCs are reasonable to pursue either an annulment or divorce, though this is a romance so it isn’t actually necessary! I felt bad with Evan dealing with Viola, too.

A lot of page time is that interim ‘will they won’t they’ because the situation is complex from old crushes to Evan having just been in a different relationship. It is unreasonable to expect they’ll just go on with life without reflecting. However, because both characters were just so sad about the feelings they were fighting and not communicating, it made the middle of this book (from about 20% to 85%) just sad to read for me. Lots of miscommunication too. I realize this might just be the mark of “normal romance pacing” so it could be only me.

I was also frustrated with a particular aspect:

Spoiler

wedding receptions are expensive, and they were really going to let Evan’s mom pay for one even though they were sure it was going to be temporary at that point. While I’m glad they did convince her to scale it down, there’s still some serious deception happening.

Evan also claims he didn’t cheat on Viola with Cam but that’s simply untrue. They kissed multiple times before the two broke up, and not just the one drunken one at the wedding.