readingwithkt's reviews
611 reviews

The risk with requesting a book before reviews come out is that sometimes you don’t know how graphic it might be until the reviews start pouring in. That’s what happened with this book for me unfortunately. I liked the sound of this title so was excited to try it. But after requesting it, I saw several reviews about the content being quite graphic and decided to steer away from it - just a gut feeling that the content may be too graphic for me.

Note: this review is based on an ARC and it contains spoilers.

The Friendship Fling by Georgia Stone is a fairly slow burn (fake) friends to lovers story set in London, UK. 

Ava and Finn happen to meet one day in the coffee shop where Ava works. Finn is bright and warm and optimistic, whereas Ava is closed off and rude for the most part. She happens to use his name one day when reassuring her concerned friend and flatmate that she is making friends at work, and he ends up being invited to a flat warming party they are hosting in six or so weeks time. Meanwhile, Finn discloses that he has a London bucket list that he would like to complete before his contract ends at the end of the summer (conveniently, at around a similar time to the party). He invites Ava to help him tick the items off his bucket list and she reluctantly agrees. So continues a sort of fake friendship between the two - he agrees to keep up the appearance that he is her friend to her flatmate, meanwhile they go on all these adventures together ticking off his bucket list. They end up forming a genuine friendship (and then romance).

The book flips between Ava and Finn as our two narrators, though Ava gets far more of a voice than Finn. Given how uneven this was, I'm not sure that I felt it was necessary. Or rather, perhaps I would have wanted it to be more evenly split and Finn's storyline with his parents/upbringing could have been fleshed out a little further.

I found the friendship side of their relationship very readable and while I felt the grumpy-sunshine dynamic was a bit overplayed (though this isn't a trope I'd usually reach for so maybe a lot of grumpy-sunshine romances are like this?), I enjoyed their adventures and was enjoying ticking items off Finn's bucket list. 

I liked the message of encouragement within the book for figuring out what your dreams are, allowing yourself to pursue them, and also taking time with yourself to process trauma and be able to move forward in a healthy way.

I also thought that the introduction of Max, Ava's brother, was a clever one as it allowed us to get to see a softer side to Ava early on in the book and we started to see some of her personal values come through as we watched them interact and heard the way she felt about him.

As the friendship turns into romance, I found that I had to suspend disbelief a little to overcome the somewhat corny nature of some of the scenes and the way their feelings seemed to become extraordinarily intense very quickly. I felt like we skipped the parts where people naturally start to develop feelings for someone and went straight to "I would do anything for this person" type of declarations. It was a little intense and involved basically an entire personality transplant for our Ava, who had been dismissive, cold, sarcastic, and closed off for the other half of the book.

There are a couple of open door sex scenes in the book. Perhaps I was distracted by how strangely their relationship was shifting between these extremes, but I found it difficult to get lost in the sex scenes. I owed this, at least in part, to the way they were written. There's one point where she pulls a vibrator out of a bedside table but doesn't actually name the object, so I was very confused in thinking perhaps it was a condom she threw at Finn. Then the way the author describes orgasms as being a heaviness below the stomach was a little strange. And the general flow of the sex scenes were just a little stilted or clumsily written for me.

All-in-all, a light read which has the underlying message of figuring yourself out, and a fun friendship between two very different characters.

Tropes: grumpy=sunshine, (fake)-friends=to=lovers, only one bed.

I could hardly put it down! This book kept me awake until 3:30am.

The Launch Date by Annabelle Slator is a sexy enemies-to-lovers novel that restored my faith in the trope. Sworn enemies, Grace and Eric are forced to work together on the launch of a new dating app. Making partnerships with various brands around the city, the pair go together to test out the date ideas before they are used as part of the brand launch. Slowly, we learn how they came to be sworn enemies, figure out the dynamics of their rivalry, and discover alongside them that maybe they actually just make a really great team.

I thought this was a well written, compelling read. I was able to believe in the dynamic between the two and get wrapped up in their story as it unfolded, in all it´s (tense, frustrating and ultimately sexy) glory. 

Grace as a character was a little frustrating as our narrator at times and her communication was extremely poor and immature, and there was also a scene with an ex-boyfriend which I found a little over the top, but all-in-all it was a really enjoyable read!


Tropes: enemies to lovers, forced proximity, office romance, billionaire romance, fake dating (kinda), only one bed.

Gave this one a good go when I first received it but couldn’t get into it and then obviously forgot to give feedback (sorry about that!).
Felt the book lacked depth of character and perhaps the world building was too complicated for me personally.
Hope this book finds its readers!

The risk with requesting a book before reviews come out is that sometimes you don’t know how graphic it might be until the reviews start pouring in. That’s what happened with this book for me unfortunately. After requesting it, I saw several reviews about the content being quite graphic and decided to steer away from it - just a gut feeling that the content may be too graphic for me.

The risk with requesting a book before reviews come out is that sometimes you don’t know how graphic it might be until the reviews start pouring in. That’s what happened with this book for me unfortunately. I liked other books from this author so was excited to try it. But after requesting it, I saw several reviews about the content being quite graphic and decided to steer away from it - just a gut feeling that the content may be too graphic for me.

I bought this one on kindle some time ago, curious to read more books with ace rep. I'm not part of the asexual community so can't comment on the rep but I enjoyed that element of the book and thought the call center idea was a creative way to approach sharing information and resources. 

We follow two central characters: Courtney and Sophie. Rivals all through their school years until one takes things too far and their relationship turns sour. Now enemies, the girls hardly acknowledge one another's presence and happily lose contact after school. Years later, both now adults, their paths cross again as Sophie moves in upstairs from Courtney.

This book was at times a challenging read. The author delves into a lot of heavy topics for such a short book and I felt like some were vastly underdeveloped. These topics include: domestic abuse, addiction, health issues, toxic family systems, bullying, sexuality, acephobia, self acceptance and self esteem. For a roughly 200 page book, I just felt that this was a little too much to cover and a lot of the issues remained unresolved and not meaningfully explored, in my opinion. The book could have either done with being longer, allowing for more depth on these issues, or the number of topics could have been reduced, thus giving the story more focus.  This was the most disappointing element of the book for me as a reader.

The romance was a little predictable, though I felt that I had to suspend disbelief about the way it played out. I also felt that there were some really deep issues that one character could have done with more support to heal from, and there was an implication that the romance was a balm on those wounds somehow, which I felt a little icky about. 

The review sounds very negative but I finished the book - something which I don't always do - so that shows that there were things that I liked about it. Let me also talk about those.

I liked that we get to meet Courtney's friendship group and that they are formed as characters in their own right. I would have liked to know more about them, or feel that there was some closure on some of their experiences in the book, but I'm still glad that they weren't written as cardboard cutouts of characters as can sometimes happen to side characters in romance books. 

I liked the author's use of flashbacks to help us understand the history between the two characters and the way their dynamic had formed and then soured.

And I also liked that Courtney was very secure in her identity as asexual and was even working to support other people who were struggling with their identity and trying to learn more about asexuality.

All in all, there was some good and some less good about the book, so I rated it a middle of the road 2.5 stars. 

I´m really loving this series and looking forward to it continuing. The series is a wholesome story about two neighbours who discover a mutual love of food - one loves to cook it and one loves to eat it. They start off meeting to share food, and slowly their relationship blossoms. They also make friends along the way, and we get to learn about their own individual stories and experiences. I love the descriptions of food and the way our two main characters get excited to try receipes and enjoy food together. In volumes 3 and 4 there are some discussions of disordered eating, and some readers may find the series difficult reading due to the ways in which each individual has been socialised around food.