2.5 stars

Allie travels to NYC to find out where he mother has been spending her free time. She follows her mother to a bar, where she meets a handsome British stranger and she eventually finds herself telling this stranger all about her life and why she is in NYC.

Winston is divorced and recently moved to NYC from London to make sure his daughter wasn't alone as she began filled in the big city. After meeting Allie in a bar, strangers become friends and friends become lovers. Winston does everything in his power to help Allie along in her journey of finding her mom.

I see that this book received decent reviews, however, it just wasn't for me. The whole beginning of the book I found myself getting bored. I also was distracted because I kept trying to figure out how old the characters were. I felt like Winston acted young, but he has a college aged daughter so that threw me off. They eventually get to their age toward the end of the book (Winston is almost 40 and Allie is 26). I would have preferred to know that in the beginning though to help me get a better understanding of each character. Their romantic relationship also developed super quick. Above all, the storyline just didn't intrigue me or gave me wanting to read more. I probably wouldn't have finished the book if it weren't for it being an ARC

My Goodreads review will be posted upon publication

I stopped reading this book 45% of the way through. Winston and Allie act too juvenile. The sex is something that teenagers fumble through. Allie is so caught up in what her mother and birth father are doing that it takes up all her time. Winston is afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing where his daughter is concerned. That he ends up doing nothing. I hope it gets better, but I lost the patients that it would take to get through the other half.

Allie Fredericks is supposed to be in Wisconsin, planning her parents’ anniversary party, but her mom just... disappeared. Allie found her in a Manhattan bar with a man who is certainly not her husband, and now she feels obligated to bring her back home and save their family.

Winston Chamberlain didn’t expect, upon walking into the bar, to be swept up in Allie’s messy world, but he can hardly say no when he realizes how much fun she is. As the night goes on, the two have a hard time saying goodbye. They’re such opposites, but maybe they can make something real out of this chance connection.

A couple years ago, I read Ruthie Knox’s Truly, and I literally stayed up until like 4am to finish it. I remember going to work the next day completely bleary-eyed and exhausted, but not regretting a single second of it because that book was seriously good. So when I saw Knox’s Madly pop up on Netgalley, I immediately requested. I was not disappointed.

One of the things I loved about Truly was the Wisconsinite-on-the-East-Coast vibe. That’s alive and well here in Madly since this time, we’re following May’s younger sister, Allie. I loved all the shoutouts to my home state. I loved that Allie isn’t from a big city like Madison or Milwaukee, she’s from Manitowoc!

My only experience with Manitowoc was in the olden days of 2007 when I had a brand new drivers license and my mom sent me up to Wausau from Fond du Lac to visit my grandma. Highway 45 was closed for construction, and I tried to pull out my old-fashioned paper map (since GPS wasn’t as ubiquitous then as it is now), but since I have no sense of direct, I evidently turned east instead of west and ended up in Manitowoc! It was really traumatizing, but I survived. And anyway, that’s my one and only Manitowoc experience. (You’d probably have to pull up Google Maps if you’re not from the area in order to understand how ridiculous this whole scenario was.) Every time Allie mentioned her hometown, it sent me straight back to 2007.

Anyway, Allie and Winston were both really great characters. I was a little worried at first that their relationship was going to start off as a weird drunken hookup while Allie was all sad and vulnerable about her mom running away, but their relationship was actually super cute. They fit together really well, and even though everything happened over a few days, it seemed like it progressed really naturally. I was not bothered at all by the ~15 year age difference, and I loved that Winston was always a gentleman and Allie was a strong, independent, business-savvy woman.

I have to say, I might have loved May and Ben in Truly (and I really did, I have them four stars), but their relationship seemed to be lacking a little in comparison with Allie and Winston. I don’t know if Ruthie Knox’s writing has improved, or if my tastes have changed, but I just really loved Allie and Winston’s relationship. I loved their list and how even though they made the list together, they never pressured each other to cross things off, and the things that they were trying to cross off didn’t always work right away, but they never got mad or impatient with each other.

I liked Winston’s daughter, Bea, and I especially liked that he didn’t pressure her into acting a certain way to appease him. He might be a prim and proper London guy who walks around in expensive suits and silk socks and lives in a really fancy apartment, but he’s totally okay with Bea wearing ripped overalls, walking around covered in paint, with multicolored hair, living in a crappy apartment with too many friends, as long as that makes her happy. I also liked that Bea didn’t create any drama within Winston’s new relationship and actually encouraged it because she wanted her dad to be happy.

This book was honestly close enough to perfect that I cannot give it any less than five stars!

This one just wasn't for me. I struggled to connect to the characters and the author's writing style. I loved the idea but I just didn't find myself able to sink into the story. That's not to say that it was a bad reading experience it just wasn't a great one.

Ruthie Knox is usually an auto-buy for me, having loved About Last Night and the Camelot series. But some of her usual magic was missing from Madly. Given the frenetic energy of Allie balanced against staid Winston, I really felt the title of this young-woman-with-a-million-issues-falls-in-love-with-older-guy-within-a-week trip should have been Madcap instead.

Ruthie Knox creates such emotionally sharp characters, yet it was jarring just how much action took place in Winston and Allie's inner thoughts. Pages and pages of their insecurities and issues- Allie frantically trying to be enough to keep her seeming fractured family together while Winston barely copes with the aftermath of his divorce and new life in New York - dragged on so long that I was surprised to realize their story would finish in just a few days. So much internal dialogue and so much unnecesssary detail, like Allie picking her toenail or Winston kissing the fuzzy downy hairs on her upper lip was packed in those few days that the story felt much longer that it actually was. Especially when in the end, much of the conflicts could have been solved if all the adults had merely talked to each other instead of jumping to conclusions and holding onto grudges/fears/secrets.

In the end, despite the really fantastic descriptions of a week in New York, the problem for me was that I never connected with Winston and Allie together, much less any of the other characters. I have Allie's sister May and Ben's book, Truly, in my TBR, but may not rush to it, given how unsympathetic and grudging May was toward her own sister and how surly and unfeeling Ben appeared to be. I was thrilled to get a glimpse at Nev and Cath from the favorite About Last Night, but didn't need to read Winston's thoughts about Nev's receding hairline.

Allie was exhausting with her moods and costumes and insecurities and especially her overuse of the word Jeez, but what sold this was Winston. He is so happy to worship Allie from near or far, that I could overlook the disparity between them: at 40, Winston is a divorced father of a grown daughter barely a few years younger than Allie. I found myself rooting more for a happy reconciliation with his daughter Bea than I did for Winston's HEA with Allie.

To be honest, I wonder how much of this was due to my own high expectations. This wasn't close to the emotional journey of Nev and Cath's book, and the next time I read a Ruthie Knox book, I won't let their ghosts stand in the way.

Highly enjoyed. Absolutely loved the first half-ish and then thought it dragged out a bit. It was nice to get to know Allie and Winston and revisit characters from Knox's previous books, even though it sometimes felt like she was managing too many characters. I did enjoy the romance even if it at times sooner of they're scenes together felt repetitive. Loved all the stuff about successful women and the challenges that successful women face.

Wow! This book is amazing. The character development of all the characters but especially Allie…BEAUTIFULLY done! The dialogue was spot on, believable and real. This book is so much more than a Romance novel and deserves to be placed in a broader category to reach a larger audience. I loved this story and its colorful characters. Those last few chapters had me crying happy tears and cheering…YES! The only drawback in this advanced copy is the typos….it needs some more editing. Sometimes I had to reread a sentence a few times to figure out that an incorrect word was used and that a word was meant to be something different. With editing this is a 5 star book! I hope she has more books in her like this. This is by far my favorite book by Ruthie Knox/Robin York.

Pretty sophisticated and fun story of loads of characters who cut around NYC tracking down a middle age mom who tends to leave her Wisconsin home for NYC occasionally and showing back home like nobody's business. Now her children are adults and armed with some clues they attempt to find mom.

A story of intertwined lives and mad tracking skills in a city of eight million makes this a little madcap and our MC get a little romance too.

I received a copy of this novel from the publisher via NetGalley.

Allie’s mother Nancy has periodically disappeared from their home in Wisconsin “for some time to herself” all Allie’s life. Eventually Allie’s dad revealed that Nancy goes to spend time with Justin, who is Allie’s birth father. Now 26, Allie has come to New York to retrieve her mother and return her home in time for her parents’ 30th wedding anniversary party.

The story opens with Allie spying on her mother and Justin in a bar and persuading a passing stranger, Winston, to shield her as her mother passes on her way to the bathroom. Nancy and Justin slip away, leaving Allie with no way of finding them again (not sure why she didn’t just confront her mother in the bar…), but it turns out that Justin is a client of Winston’s family’s investment business and Winston finds himself agreeing to help Allie with her scheme. By the end of the story, Allie is being aided by Winston, his assistant, his driver, his daughter Bea, his brother Neville (and Neville’s girlfriend) and by Allie’s sister and her boyfriend.

The opening scene in the bar (after the first three mystifying pages) is entertaining, and all the bits where Allie is trying to shake off her “nice” ex, Matt, are amusing. However, the middle section of the book is quite depressing; apart from the assumption that Nancy has been treating her husband so badly, there is a lot of angst between Allie and her sister May. May has been oblivious to what has been going on and takes the news badly. May and Allie each feel the other has been a poor sister, then they each realize that they are also to blame. Winston mulls over the aftermath of his divorce and how badly he has treated Neville. Ben, May’s boyfriend, quite literally is either cooking or menacing some one.

Bea provides some light relief and Allie’s dad is a lovely character, but I didn’t really warm to Allie. We are supposed to believe that she is a hot shot business woman with expertise in antiques and running restaurants (although clearly her businesses can tick over for a week at a time without her doing much about them), but emotionally she seems quite immature and muddled: what exactly was she planning to do about her mother? Why the ridiculous clothes? I never quite forgave her for ruining the pizza evening when Neville and Cath arrive in New York. She was just too self-centred for me.

The closing scenes at Brooklyn Bridge were well done, but I don’t really believe in Winston and Allie’s happy ending.

This was an amazing story about a women spying on her mother, trying to figure out what she was doing. In doing so she meets Winston. He helps her find out everything.

This book, just WOW. I have never read a Ruthie Knox book before and while reading it I could tell there were books before it, however it also stands alone as I was never lost. It seems like it bring characters together from her two previous books which I have to read. This book was just so wonderful that I have to read the books that come before it.

The best thing I can say is that finishing this book gave me a huge high. You finish this book and you just feel really good. Have your mom on speed dial because well this story is the perfect Mother's Day story and feel good story. I have enjoyed many books throughout the year, but none have made me like this did as I finished the story.

I really hesitate to describe this story because this story has so many spoilers and for you to enjoy this story you need to not know them. You really need to explore things as the main characters do in this story - not knowing what will happen.

This story is very centered on what is love and what is family. Love is not easy and there are many trials and tribulations. But never run away and love will win out. Thats the message I think this book sends and Ioved exploring that theme with this books heroine Allie.

I LOVED Allie. One night she meets a guy in a bar and Winston meets a girl. They form an odd relationship but in the best way. By meeting and taking a chance on each other they will not only change one family but two. Winston is a single dad of college student and one night instead of staying home he goes to a bar where his entire life changes when he meets Allie.

Why and how Allie is in that bar well thats the main story and it was aan absolute pleasure to read this book and go on the adventure with Allie and Winston, his daughter Bea, his driver Jean, his brother Nev and Allie's father, mother and sister May.

a so so read