3.6 ⭐️

Spice: 🌶️.5/5

Format: audiobook

Narration: 🎤🎤🎤🎤🎤/5

This was a sweet and romantic, low-angst story between two very unproblematic characters who deeply cared about each other.

Ultimately, I was pretty bored the entire time. I don’t need angst to enjoy a book, but I need something to keep my interest, and I just found the plot kind of bland. And other than being anxious, Jules really didn’t seem any other kind of personality trait. 

The “forbidden” aspects of this book both seemed to matter too much and not at all? I was kind of confused by it. It’s like they fought their feelings for each other until they randomly decided to not anymore.

As a person who suffers from anxiety, I always love seeing representation in books. However I felt it wasn’t realistic in this case. I wish we all had Eriks in our lives to stand up for us in every. single. social. situation. But the reality is most of us don’t. And the fact that Jules had a panic attack pretty much every chapter and needed Erik to constantly save him and speak up for him just didn’t feel like good representation. It kind of bordered on infantilization and gave me the ick, to be honest.

I also didn’t really like any of the side characters. Jules’s and Erik’s brothers all pissed me off. And I didn’t like that no one really seemed to care about Jules’s anxiety except for Erik. 

I try not to let spice, or lack-there-of, dictate my ratings, but come on—this was a brother’s best friend trope! I need more. I needed hot. I needed forbidden. It was disappointing.

So this was unfortunately a miss for me but I did enjoy the authors’s writing style mostly so I’ll try another book in the future. Also, I’m glad I did the audiobook because the narrator was perfection. Gonna look into more of his work as well.