Booked on a Feeling

Thanks to the author Jayci Lee and the publisher St. Martin's Griffin for providing me with an ecopy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

This is the 3rd book in the A Sweet Mess series. I've read all of them except for the first book so far. I really need to go back and read that first book. Luckily these can easily be read as standalones.

I ended up really enjoying this one but I did have a couple complaints which I will mention here in a minute. But lets talk about what I liked first. Lizzy and Jack have been friends for decades and Jack has pretty much always known that he loves her but never acted on those feelings. I loved the friends to lovers trope in this book. It progressed naturally and of course both characters were kind of hesitant to act on those feeling at first because they didn't want to mess up their friendship but one of them was more hesitant than the other. Their chemistry was obvious to pretty much everyone but them.

So the romance was cute but I have the same 2 complaints that I had for the previous book in this series and that is I'm not particularly a big fan of fade to black romance scenes. This doesn't really affect my overall rating that much it's just a personal preference thing. The other thing is how repetitive some things were and the lack of communication. I hate when the characters don't communicate even more so when all the drama at the end of the book could be avoided by a simple conversation.

So yeah overall I did really enjoy reading this one even though I had a few issues with it I still had a good time with it and look forward to reading more by this author.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for my copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!

This book will be published on July 26, 2022.

So, I loved this book! I thought this was a cute, lighthearted romance that follows childhood friends to lovers, Jack and Lizzy. Lizzy is going above and beyond to please her mother, becoming a lawyer living in LA, and following the standards her mom sets for her. She has a moment where she questions her true happiness and decides to take a break from work, and sets out to Weldon, where her best friend of over a decade, Jack, lives, and works in his family's brewery. Lizzy is on this path to self-discovery in terms of what SHE wants to do in life, all while Jack is internally battling a new career move, putting his family's business behind. While in Weldon, spark fly and the pent up emotions toward one another come to a head. Enter romance. I was not expecting any steam from this book, but it did get a little spicy! I enjoyed the relationship and chemistry between Jack & Lizzy, and loved this trope! This was my first childhood friends to lovers book and I thought it was just adorable!

I rated this book 4 stars - I liked it a lot, but in comparison to other books I've given 5 stars to this one doesn't compare.

For more of my reviews, check out my blog.

Unfortunately, Booked on a Feeling was ultimately disappointing. I actually considered DNFing around the 20% mark, because I was flat out bored. I should have just stopped reading then. Obviously, it goes without saying that it took me quite a while to care about the characters. Lizzy and Jack were interesting for about maybe a third of the novel, and then boredom came rushing back in.

This book needs another pass by with an editor, I think. The last like five percent of the novel needs to be reworked, because all it is is the ‘narrator' telling us what's happened. There is little to no showing going on. It's just and Lizzy did this, and then she did that. And then she realized this, and Jack realized that. I actually ended up skimming several pages, because I was so bored my eyes wouldn't focus. There's so much back-and-forth (and not in a good way) in the later half of this novel. Jack wants to move to LA, Lizzy wants to move to Weldon. They switch, and Lizzy figures out that she doesn't want to be in Weldon without Jack, etc, etc. It's a whole thing.

This book had the potential to be cute, but it just fell completely flat. The characters had very, very little personality. In the rare instance they DID show some sort of personality, their chemistry shone. But these scenes were few and far between, when they SHOULD have been the entire focus of the novel!

And don't even get me started on the epilogue. A surprise-honey-I'm-pregnant epilogue? When children hadn't been mentioned by either character in the ENTIRE novel? Pass.

Blah. I won't be picking up any of the other books in this series, if they're all written like this one. Two and a half stars for Booked on a Feeling, and that's me being quite generous.