Mini Review | Book Lovers by Emily Henry

Format: Kindle

Read: June 2023

I’m always trepidatious going into romance books but this was a lot of fun! It’s not perfect but it had me up far too late reading two nights in a row.

I have a feeling I will end up rereading this one!

The things I loved –

• I really enjoyed Nora as a subversion of the cold city bitch character trope, and I was very happy that she did not end the book being any less ambitious and career driven. She has emotional character growth but she doesn’t change as a person or have to sacrifice anything of herself.
• Nora and Charlie have a lot of chemistry, and he has emotional maturity and is an open communicator!
• Great steamy scenes and I appreciated the centring of Nora’s horniness!
• Romance has real emotional depth and connection, one that you can believe leads to a healthy, long and successful relationship.
• The idea of them as “rivals” is ditched very quickly which is good because I hate the “enemies to lovers” trope. It’s only really a concept for about two chapters.
• The names of the small town establishments are fun!

It’s not quite 5 stars because –

• The balance felt a bit off with the amount of space the Libby plot took up. Arguably that ends up the main plot and the romance is secondary. That could be 5 stars if it was fleshed out better but Libby never becomes a fully rounded character (despite her importance to Nora) and I didn’t feel like the resolution to “what’s going on with Libby” was complete or satisfying on an emotional level.
• I felt that the family trauma needed to be either dialled back, or Nora and Libby needed to have a more honest conversation to resolve it.
• The ending (being predictable, as required by the genre!) felt a bit drawn out but that would have been aided by a more satisfying resolution to the above.

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