Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The book gave me that sad, nostalgic feeling of "wow that was a really beautiful book." 1) The book is a beautiful story about overcoming trauma - specifically fears about falling in love. This happens for a lot of books (I'm thinking Ugly Love as another popular romance book). But really this book has realistic trauma situations and there are so many pages that you really see the characters change and unravel from their pain points. So by the end, I really understood the two main characters (there are alternating chapter POVs!). The author explained in the note at the end that some of her friends had some tragedies happen to them while she was writing this book, and that helped her realize this book would be about choosing to love even when you know it could hurt. It's definitely the message and theme of this book so it's super good in that way. This book doubles as a therapy session tbh. In the world of mental health/relationship psychology, I would highly recommend this book. You're basically watching an anxious-avoidant relationship both become more secure (hence the title of the book: Things We Never Got Over) 2) This book is too long. I'm really not kidding. The first 20 chapters should have been cut in half like at best. The author said in the author's note she did not know what the book would be about when she wrote it, I kinda see that still. It's just a lot of romance building and when I tell you the second half of the book is SOOO strong with all the conflict and juicy drama, the length of first half was not needed. Like not needed. As someone who reads a lot of scripts for shows/movies, I am a big fan that every word on a page as a writer should be earned, and so much of the beginning was truly boring to the plot. I am impressed by the original readers who kept on going and then gave the book high reviews. I truly just kept on reading because this book was talked about so much that I had to see the hype. In Hindsight, I would have read a summary online for the first half of the book and then skipped to chapter 21 and started reading the book from then on. Still would have been an over 300-page book to read. 3) This should be an exciting series! The author interweaves other characters' love lives so there will be more books in the future that let us see these other characters fall in love. I am so excited cause Lucy and Sloane brought the heat that sometimes I was more engaged in their bickering than in Noami and Knox's. 4) There's sunshine / grumpy love and then there's like good girl submissive energy / bad boy dominant energy love and this relationship is more the latter. Grumpy guy's usually aren't rude to the actual girl (they are more like thoughtful grumpies...like Adam Carlsen or Luke Danes). This guy at the beginning was just straight rude to the female lead. I was like now what the heck. And home girl had like no backbone to him, for 90% of this book. Like he straight disrespected her many times so I wasn't really into him as a character. I just have a distate for men treating women like garbage but then buying them gifts and so its supposed to be okay? (um no.) until of course then in the end I got more proud of him over time, but to me he's definitely a guy where he's not really my type. (But for those who read the book, I'm probably more of a girl like Sloane.) So yes just a heads up for readers, it's more of the good girl / bad boy chemistry. 5) LOTS of relationship psychology and psycho-analyzing. Sometimes I liked it, other times I felt that the author copied and pasted therapy quotes online and put them into the book. As in it was very generic quotes about choosing love over fear. This book is full of a lot of emotionally unintelligent grown adults being told things they should have learned in their 20s. How have both of the leads not worked through their relationship patterns by now or been told them before? These are conversations people usually have in their 20s, but it might just be a generational thing that people are learning how to heal later. But just a heads up that characters are being told advice that seemed very young to hear for their age. They easily could have been in their 20s in terms of their behavior. Overall: Really great book about trauma and choosing love over fear! Way too long of a book, really strong second half, and would highly recommend it if you like good girl/bad boy love tropes or like relationship psychology since there is a lot of relationship psycho-analyzing that the characters do with each other.