After losing her job, her home, and her friends in her divorce, Nora Pitts is determined not to make the same mistakes when she starts over in the small town of Shadow Creek, Washington. No more slaving away in the lab at the expense of her social life, and definitely no more men. Ever. But making friends in her thirties is so much harder than she anticipated. And when it comes to her gorgeous yet obnoxious neighbor, it’s a whole lot easier to make enemies.
Eli Hardin doesn’t have a lot of sympathy for his uptight neighbor, until he overhears her so-called new friends making fun of her un-datable status. Suddenly he finds himself volunteering for a date with a woman who’s been leaving angry hate-notes in his mailbox, and in way over his head. Because all it takes is one disastrous date with Nora for Eli to fall hard.
But falling for Eli isn’t something Nora’s ready for—not when he’s her complete opposite, and especially not when he turns out to be the best friend she’s made in Shadow Creek. But as her attraction and her feelings for Eli grow hotter, resisting him might just lead to heartbreak anyway.
A lot of what Sara Rider did with this book was absolutely amazing. It was such an enjoyable and beautiful romance with characters that had a lot of layers that they had to let go in order to be what they wanted to be and to be completely happy. I really enjoyed the first book, but this one topped it. I felt like everything was more complex and interesting and the situations felt like they had more dimensions and I was super happy to see that. I went into this book thinking that it was going to be something and it surprised me being something completely different. When you begin the book, you think it's going to be rivals to lovers, because they're neighbors who hate each other. But then you realize that the real meat of the story is in their developing friendship, in seeing them accepting and caring about each other and then falling for each other. Normally, with friends to lovers you get friends that when the book starts they already know one another but here you get to see it grow from the beginning and it's wonderful.
Like it happened with Real Kind of Love, the characters in this book felt like real people. The descriptions of their feelings and their interests made me care about their happiness and that's what you want in a romance. Also, the fact that they were complete opposites was so refreshing because they united in things that could complement them but also disagreed a lot and at the end worked things through and grew as people because of it. Additionally, I loved seeing a divorced heroine in her 30s struggling to make friends in a new town since that's a very real thing that people go through since they usually don't have the setting of a school or university to make long lasting friends. Nora has extreme germophobia and I loved that Eli always respects her feelings and boundaries and never questions what she has to do in order to feel ok. I thought that was very thoughtful of the author.
I have to say that even though I liked a lot of things, I was still disappointed at the lack of representation. It was an entirely white, straight, cis, allo book without characters with marginalized identities and that never lets me like a book completely. There was a little LGBT+ rep coded and a lot of mental health coded but it was never talked about at all on text and I think this book would have been amazing if those things would have been included and talked about because Nora had a lot of reflections about her germophobia but it never went further than that, even when it got really bad. But that is a choice that the author made for her character. Even though those things affected my overall enjoyment, I loved the plot and the characters!
