I finally read this after two years on the tbr, and it was good! 


This is not quite a five star for me and I don’t feel like rounding up because when I’m annoyed by stuff, I can’t do it. But I liked this, truly. 

This is a really good story of growth, female friendship, overcoming divorce, grief  and finding family and love again. I liked Aurora a lot, but she did have a lot of ‘not like other girl’ energy which took me down a notch. I don’t know when this was first written, I do have the updated audiobook, but it feels a bit dated in its perpetuation of some female tropes that I don’t love. But that was a small thing and wasn’t super prevalent so easy to overlook. 

Rhodes was cool and the typical dark and broody hero. He wasn’t that nuanced as most of the focus of the book was on Aurora. He was just her love interest and their romance wasn’t precisely the core of this story. I actually liked that about this. I liked that he was an accessory and tool for her growth and didn’t really have any character arc or growth for himself. That’s definitely Zapata’s style, to focus on the heroine, and I actually think it’s her strong point. I prefer this to the woman fixes the man trope 🤮. 

Couple things that irked me and preventing me from rounding up (just personal annoyances) 

1. His nickname for her is Buddy. This is extremely unsexy and every time he said it I thought he was talking to his son. 

2. This woman goes pee more than any fictional characters I’ve ever read in my entire life. 

3. The entire epilogue was filled with poo and pee jokes. 

4. The bonus scene was presented after the epilogue but linearly comes before it. I think putting it as a first epilogue would have been better since this audiobook was completely re-recorded. 

That being said, this is quite good and I enjoyed it a lot.