I loved the American Roommate Experiment and the Spanish Love Deception, but I struggled with the Long Game and was nervous to carry on with this series. Guess what? I struggled with it and wanted moreeeee.  

This book has two points of view. The first is Josie Moore and we met her in the first book, she has given the opposite sex – and love – plenty of chances. Four exactly, if you count all her failed engagements, and five if you include the absentee father who kept her existence a secret until very recently. So, when her father decided to announce his retirement with a splashy magazine piece about the family, Josie realizes her romantic history is a complicated PR issue. The second point of view is Matthew Flanagan, and he is in the mud, literally. Not only has he been fired from his job, but also the tires of his car are stuck in the muck after taking a wrong turn as he enters Green Oak, North Carolina. So, he grabs a duffel with his essentials and goes in search of a place to crash until he gets his life back. But instead, he finds his best friend’s sister, Josie, greeting him as her fiancé. What starts as a big messy misunderstanding quickly turns into an arrangement with Matthew playing a new role as doting fiancé. A fifth engagement and a stunt that makes Josie’s stomach turn, but every dilemma requires a choice between equally undesirable alternatives, and Matthew doesn’t seem to mind becoming one more number in a colourful list of grooms-that-never-were. Despite the ring on her finger, Josie knows this is only temporary, even if the rest of the small town believes that the fifth time’s the charm. 

This book felt like it was missing depth. I was so excited for Josie, but besides the issues that Josie mentioned which is that she was terrified to go down the aisle and a people pleaser, but that was it. I felt like her father making an appearance and then being a dick was just brushed over until the end, I felt like Josie and Matthew should have picked up that Adalyn was pregnant earlier considering how well they knew her (I saw that one coming) and I felt like Matthew’s issues were just swept under the rug until the love confession. We got the relationship building in the end, but besides Matthew having feelings and joking with Adalyn, the relationship was very rushed. There was no one bed chapter, there was a bit of don’t do X to my fiancé or you’ll have to deal with me but again it was towards the end, I wanted this throughout the whole book. I wanted this to be dual POV especially to see how much Matthew wanted her, besides a few comments, you didn’t really know. You didn’t know if he was joking, just wanted sex, or liked her. For a small-town romance as well, there wasn’t really a lot of the small town or the people in it. They were in it for the first 100 pages and that’s about it. I wanted the people to defend their mayor and wanted them to help get rid of Duncan or Andrew. 

Grandpa Moe saved this book and wanted him to be the stereotypical old man where he would speak his mind. I wanted him to smack the shit out of Josie’s dad and just spill the truth possibly about the pregnant and her ex-fiancé leaking the video. If there was a wedding, I would have loved for Grandpa Moe to walk her down the aisle. I just wanted him to be like the brutally honest grandpa and knows no bounds, he was good when he appeared, I just would have loved him to be sassier and funnier.  

I think I had my hopes up too high for this book and this series and my expectations with romances are high and this didn’t hit which upset me because I loved the previous series.