cia_of_the_stars's reviews
258 reviews

 I LOVE THIS BOOK SO SO MUCH. I cannot believe I almost DNF'd this book in the first stretch because it ended up making me unbelievably happy.

Love and Other Words will probably always be my favorite Christina Lauren, and this isn't quite on that level, but this book has the best prose of any of their books.

If you loved the movie Crazy Rich Asians, with all the rich family drama backdropped by a big fancy wedding week, you need to pick this up.

This book somehow touches on classism and commentary on the rich and messed up family dynamics while also being a fun, light-hearted summery romcom. And it's now one of my favorite romcoms I've read.

One of my favorite things is when writers juxtapose opulence and glam and spectacle with the darker underside of it all, and I'm so impressed by how well that was folded into this fun rom-com. OBSESSED actually.

I don't know how to properly capture how well Christina Lauren painted pictures with their prose using the smallest details, so here's a random section as an example:

"We slip out to the covered patio, where we find a rolled-up rattan mat, set ourselves down, and eat pizza off paper plates, staring out into the darkness at the wild surf crashing on black sand in the distance."

GORGEOUS. That's the kind of writing I eat up.

If you want me to truly love and be obsessed with a romance, I don't want to just love the romance itself, I want to LOVE the characters, both as individuals and as a couple. I want to fall in love with them, too. AND THAT WAS SO THE CASE OH MY STARS. Anna, with her pink hair and love of cheese, the way she speaks her mind, the way she describes art, her empathy, I LOVE HER. And her and West, despite being very different in that she's free-spirited and wild and he's put together and polite, fit together so well because they're both actually the more level-headed and calm ones with so much heart. Ugh I love them so much I wish I could better articulate it.

Sometimes, weird writing choices threw me a bit (like, calling Liam's junk g-d throughout the book was...odd to say the least), but not enough to ruin the book as a whole. Also, I fear marriage of convenience has risen the ranks to become one of my favorite tropes. It's honestly way better than fake dating. Upped stakes and tension, extra forced proximity, plus the oh so satisfying use of "my wife" (especially when the MMC starts thinking of the FMC as "my wife" without even maybe noticing), it's a perfect formula.

If you're looking for a fun romcom to make you smiley and giddy, the kind where you watch two opposite people with maybe not the best impressions of each other slowly unwrap the layers of the other person and genuinely fall for each other throughout the story, a rom-com with actually really good prose, PICK THIS UP. If you're someone who will only read summer books during the summer, GO READ THIS RIGHT NOW while there's still a week of summer left. It's so worth it. 

I have such conflicted feelings about this book. In some ways, I liked it much more than the first. Wes's POV was everything he was so down bad for Liz the entire book. Like, this is basically just a whole book of him being obsessed with her, and I'm not complaining about that.

I know a lot of people were upset at the idea of Liz and Wes breaking up and not just letting us imagine them happily together, and while I think that's valid, I think the breakup made sense. But I feel like a lot of people who LOVED the first one aren't going to love this one and might be better off just reading the road trip short story Lynn added to her website because this almost felt like a completely separate book, like a really fun college sports second chance romance with lots of pining, but not quite the sequel to BTTM.

Personally, I was here for the breakup plotline. It was like picking up a second chance romance where you have an entire first book of the couple's relationship before the breakup. The whole thing with the second chance trope is it's a couple that should have worked out but sometimes life gets in the way. So I don't think the breakup ruins them or their dynamic, and the reasoning for their breakup, and the subsequent changes, felt in-character to me. I mean, Wes spent the entire last book putting Liz before his happiness. Literally, that's what the promposal moment was. So Wes's actions make complete sense to me (and he was also going through a really hard time, so it's not like he'd be thinking through a super-rational lens).

Liz's character change in this also made sense to me. Her entire worldview was centered on romance and being a hopeless romantic, and even though that was shifted a bit in the last book because she realized that life didn't play out exactly like the romcom plotline she'd constructed for herself, she still ended up getting all the things she dreamed about, this whirlwind love and grand romantic gestures and this person she got matching tattoos and saved a cat with. For anyone, that would be a big deal, but for someone who's spent their whole life putting love on a pedestal? And then for that to fall apart and for "the love of her life" to utterly break her heart? Yeah, I can completely understand being anti-romance after that. It's very, very normal to go through phases of your life, especially as you're growing up, where you want to reject everything from your past and show that you've changed, especially in college, and ESPECIALLY after someone significant in your life hurts you.

That being said, I think maybe Painter went a bit too far in making her act different because she almost didn't feel like the same character, and there were these weird "she's so chill" and "she's one of the guys" narratives throughout. Like, "She watches football on the weekends instead of romcoms, isn't she so cool now?" And then we never get to see her start reclaiming some of the old pieces of herself. I'm not at all saying she needed to be high school Liz again, because that wouldn't even be realistic, but more of an older blend of the two. Maturing is sometimes getting past those periods of throwing out everything from your past self, learning to love pieces of younger you, and figuring out what's healthy to leave behind and what you actually never needed to "grow out of." Like, in this instance, dressing up in unique clothes and watching romcoms. I kept waiting for us to reach that point with Liz, but then that never came. Liz's character shift will probably be the most upsetting for big fans of the first book, so just a warning there.

The writing felt much more mature in this one, and even though the first made me feel for the characters, this one had me wanting to cry at so many points. Especially when we see how much has changed over the years, it left me with this intense ache and nostalgia. I loved the friend group in this and the little college found family they formed, I loved Sarah and the way she supported Wes, and the way Liz's family supported her.

So while this book felt off at times and had some weird choices added in, this was still a fun time with so much pining that made me feel all the butterflies while still maintaining an emotional undercurrent.

Thank you to NetGalley, Simon and Schuster Children's Publishing, and Lynn Painter for the ARC of this book!