I do not have words to describe how much I hated this book.

First of all, I hate when Black authors feel the need to constantly explain their culture or parts of it repetitively in a book, especially when it's adult fiction. Your audience should be curious enough to want to google these things, and as an author you should damn well expect them to rather than spoon-feeding them. It's a different kind of exhaustion reading a book and immediately knowing it was edited with white people in mind. This book did so much of that with the footnotes and the over-explaining, it was tiring. 

The romance was shit. Absolutely horrendous. Literally nothing to like about it. Angie was a man obsessed woman with no self respect and Ricky was a bastard of a man with no self awareness and sense of accountability. From their first meeting, where he took her on a pseudo date without telling her that he had a girlfriend and only brought it up when she tried to confirm that it was a date, I knew the relationship was not going to be good. It got even worse when he proceeded to disturb her at work constantly and then gaslight her when she pointed out that he led her on. I kid you not this man actually said, "Not everyone who's nice to you is trying to get with you" like what a fucking cow. The fact that her friends and his best friend kept pushing her to get with him pissed me off even more because what spawns of the devils have you surrounded yourself with girl?? Throughout the entire book Ricky kept pushing responsibility for his actions onto everyone around him except himself and it was so disgusting. And of course, the author used the death of a relative as a tool to push them back together... creative! 

It's so frustrating because I liked how the author portrayed Angie's relationship with her immigrant parents especially as the first born daughter. It's just overshadowed by the mess of a romance and the shitty main characters the book had going on. What a waste of my time.