This is a DNF for me at 34%.

I seem to be the only one, but this one just is really not working for me. I'm sure that some of my readers will enjoy it, but it is making me actively angry and I'd rather not put more time into it and end up rating it low when that's where it's already going.

Comping it to Beach Read and The Flatshare is like god-tier for me, so I probably should've tried to temper my expectations a little bit more. There is little to no character development here, I understand it's a romance (believe me, I read a lot of them) but everything works out extremely perfectly, wish fulfillmenty for our heroine. I am not a person who needs to find main characters likable, but Sadie was absolutely insufferable to me. Completely inconsiderate - how are you going to start a business out of the building where you are renting a (very below market) room? Without even talking to the other person about it? Jack seems to be immediately supportive and corrective of her self-deprecation when he literally just met her. When she takes over the main floor bathroom - again without talking to him first, they banter a bit and when he (fairly reasonably) jokes about getting a free beer the next time he comes to the bar where she works, she responds "Fuck off." Like...I would maybe talk to my brothers who I have known my whole lives like that? I would not "joke" that way to someone I met two weeks ago who is letting me take over their entire brownstone with my new business.  I think my threshold for people who don't seem to realize there are other humans in the world and their actions can have an impact is at an all-time low after the pandemic, so I fully own that a big part of my reaction to this may be the head space I am in. (Is that not true of all reading experiences, though?)

Sadie is ostensibly starting a "sustainable" flower business, but rather than grappling with the very nature of a flower business as killing things over and over and over again, she focuses on using recycled glass bottles as vases. Like, okay, but I don't think that makes you sustainable. In fact, I think that might be a marketing word that means a specific thing that you can get sued for not adhering to.

It seemed like they had just moved in together, and then the next page, it's been two months that they've been living together? But with no actual development! The "She's All That"/"Princess Diaries" moment where Sadie realizes that behind his glasses and hair, Jack is hot, actually...simply cannot relate, because I find people with shaggy hair and glasses exceedingly attractive already. I think this book would've really benefitted from being a dual POV. Granted, it seems like there's going to be some big reveal a bit later in the book about Jack, and you probably wouldn't have been able to hide that if we'd been able to be in Jack's head too. But as a result, EVERYTHING we learn about him, we learn because we've been told it. I'm not as adamantly on the "show, don't tell" bus but this is definitely a situation where he felt completely one dimensional in the 34% that I read.

Thank you to the publisher for an arc of this book to consider for addition in my bookstore. I am sincerely bummed I did not enjoy it more.