Okay so...... I loved this a lot. I HAVE BEEN SAYING FOR FOREVER AND A DAY THAT MEN WHO SCOFF AT ROMANCE BOOKS ARE MISSING OUT. You know how much easier life would be if people actually figured this out in real life? My goodness. It was fun and light but also, I wish real life could take a page out of this one. I really thought this was unique and smart and I just got the approval for the ARC of the sequel so I am super stoked to see what else there is in store for this author.

Thanks to the publisher for this review copy.

Let's make it a list because that's how my brain works anyway.

Pros :
- It promises a romance and it delivers.
- The people. So many relationships explored : husband and wife, father and daugther, sisters, girls friendships, guys friendships. I loved all the dynamics and positives messages. Especially commentaries on genders roles and identity.
- Plot, pace and writing was all good.
- The dog.

Cons :
- I found Thea reactions toward her husband at the beginning of the book very angsty. I can't stand the "I must resists but he's so hot" it makes me cringe. I know others would like that.
- The Book Club should have had more space in the book and the conversations between the guys felt very staged to me.
- Too many things between husband and wife were left unsaid. There are many conversations that should have happened in this book and didn't (and not because they censored themselves, but really because it was never mentioned). I wish we had had more of them talking because they were the best bits.
- I could not really understand what was happening in the book within the book. I wish we either had less of it, OR, more so we could actually have had a parallel story line to care about.

Will be reading the next one !

This book!!!!! It was the best book of the year for me and one of the best romances I have ever read! I would give it 10 stars if I could! It has everything you could want in a romance novel. It has friendship, humor....so much humor! The sister relationship between Thea and Liv is wonderful and real. Thea is such a relatable main character. I like how the men are able to be vulnerable yet still masculine. The premise of this story was so good and something I feel is very relevant to readers today. The friendships between the guys is priceless!!! Heart wrenching and hilarious!!! Lyssa Kay Adams had me hooked from chapter one. I feel this would be a fantastic book club discussion book with topics ranging from divorce, marriage and communication, familial relationships, friendships, sports, money and finances, parenting,learning about oneself and growth, dreams, careers, etc. I am not kidding when I say this book had it ALL!!! 10 stars!!!!!!!!!!!

Maybe it’s the adorable illustrated cover and the interesting premise, but I thought The Bromance Book Club would be a lighthearted romance about a guy trying to win back his estranged wife. While there are several moments where I laughed out loud, this book is so much more emotionally intense than I anticipated.
This book is a second chance romance following a married couple on the verge of divorce thanks to communication problems and intimacy. Our hero, Gavin, is a professional baseball player with a wife and twin daughters. When his marriage falls apart, he gets help from an all-male book club made up of men who’ve been in his position before. They use romance novels to bring the spark back into their marriage, but Gavin has a lot of work to do before he can regain Thea’s trust.
Packed with angst, tension, heartache, and humor, The Bromance Book Club is a poignant love story that celebrates romance novels in a unique, intriguing way. The characters are compelling and multifaceted and the narrative had me laughing, crying, and ultimately, swooning. This was a 5 Star read and I highly recommend adding it to your TBR list.

I been blabbing to everyone about this book.


Major league baseball guy Gavin Scott is about to lose his marriage to Thea. He is devastated and doesn't want the divorce. So his macho guy friends come to the rescue. In one of the most inventive ways that I've seen in a book.


Don't talk about book club though. What happens in book club stays in book club.

Lord Whatever His Name Was will come to the rescue as Gavin's studies the Regency romance that his bro's have assigned for him to read.


Now I will admit. I thought the reason for Gavin and Thea's problems was kinda stupid. BUT once I got into this story it completely felt fleshed out and completely had me into it. The sexy times are smoking hot to the point where I was making googly eyes at my husband. He thought I was having a seizure but still...
And now I know what washi tape is. Not that I'll ever need that info but it's stored in my head with the fifty eleven other un-useful bits of info.
Anyways I loved this book to the point where I thought I was going to have to sell a kidney to get the next one immediately.

Booksource: netgalley in exchange for review.

Gavin and Thea's marriage is on the brink of disaster and his baseball teammates pull him into a secret club that uses romance novels to understand and romance their wives. It could have been hokey but instead I found this author to have incredible comic timing (including writing a very realistic deteriorating sex scene between married people who are upset with each other.) This might be the romance novel I assign to my reading class because it's a regency inside a contemporary, with men who have something to learn (and help each other to learn it!)

The Bromance Book club is like a pain au chocolat: most of it is light and flaky but there’s a chocolate core. The book is premised on the idea of a group of men learning to be better husbands and partners by reading romance novels. The book itself, while focused on the modern-day couple, has some chapters excerpted from the book the leading man is reading. While most of the book is just fun, it touches on deeper themes and gets into the character’s backstories to explore their motivations. All in all, it’s a great beach read, winter read, or honestly it’s perfect for anytime you want to feel happier.

Gavin and Thea have the perfect life...well so it seems. Gavin is a professional baseball player; he and Thea have a pair of beautiful twin daughters together. Except...as it turns out, Thea has been faking IT for their entire marriage. As you can imagine the shock and embarrassment of discovering this causes Gavin to re-evaluate their entire marriage but not before pouting and moving into the guest room until Thea asks him for a divorce. This leads to the best discovery of Gavin’s life: the Bromance Book Club. The book club is filled with Gavin’s teammates and other professional athletes who have been in the same shoes as Gavin. They introduce him to the insight that comes from reading romance novels: learning to express his feelings and desires for his wife in a way that she understands and gives voice to the thoughts he previously hadn’t known needed to be said aloud. The story is well-written and the characters lack that perfection that can be irritating in many romance novels. Adams knows the complications of marriage and portrays them with accuracy and heart. The Bromance Book Club is filled with love and humor. I cannot wait to read the next installment.

When I started The Bromance Book Club, I immediately thought "oh, no" and all but rolled my eyes. Like oh, no this book is going to be garbage. And oh, no Lyssa Kay Adams is going to make fun of romance. And oh, no I'm just going to hate-read this, aren't I? And then I read a couple more chapters and basically completely changed my opinion. Because this book is awesome, y'all. I 100% neglected all of my grown-up responsibilities one Sunday afternoon to just binge read it—something I think I've done only a handful of times. I immediately got sucked into the plot and cared about the characters and laughed out loud before literally making heart eyes once I'd finished.

When we first meet our leading man, Gavin, he's drunk in a hotel room, distraught over the knowledge that his wife, Thea, has been faking her orgasms for their entire three-year marriage. And Gavin's (imo overblown) reaction to this fact—he refers to it as a "betrayal"...like come ON dude 🙄—was one of the reasons I thought I'd hate the book. I assumed that Adams was going to make me read 350 pages all about a dude who couldn't fathom why his wife would feel the need to fake her orgasms. And while that was indeed part of the story (and provided wonderful character growth), it wasn't everything.

Mostly, The Bromance Book Club was a story of a marriage—Thea and Gavin's—as well as how they both need to grow and change within their partnership and outside of it as individuals. As Gavin's teammate and friend Malcolm notes to Gavin, "you need to stop focusing all your attention on the fact that she faked it and start asking yourself why the fuck you didn't notice." And if that introspection just happens to come through hulking men in peak physical condition reading historical romances—whose writers "use the patriarchal society of old British aristocracy to explore the gender-based limitations placed on women today in both the professional and person spheres" and end up writing work that is "feminist as fuck"—well, then, so be it. 🤷‍♀️

I mean, was I was a soft puddle of heart eyes and good vibes at the end of the book? Did I immediately add Undercover Bromance to my tbr? Did I kind of want to read the book again? Yes, yes, and yes. I've had an arc of The Bromance Book Club since June and the book was published more than a month ago... which is to say that I wish I would have read this one sooner. But I'm also sure it pulled me out of a rut so... maybe I was meant to read it when I did.

The Bromance Book Club was simultaneously exactly what was advertised to readers and so much more. It's feminist and romantic and real in a way I wasn't expecting but thoroughly loved.

The first rule of book club:
You don't talk about book club.

Nashville Legends second baseman Gavin Scott's marriage is in major league trouble. He’s recently discovered a humiliating secret: his wife Thea has always faked the Big O. When he loses his cool at the revelation, it’s the final straw on their already strained relationship. Thea asks for a divorce, and Gavin realizes he’s let his pride and fear get the better of him.

Welcome to the Bromance Book Club.

Distraught and desperate, Gavin finds help from an unlikely source: a secret romance book club made up of Nashville's top alpha men. With the help of their current read, a steamy Regency titled Courting the Countess, the guys coach Gavin on saving his marriage. But it'll take a lot more than flowery words and grand gestures for this hapless Romeo to find his inner hero and win back the trust of his wife. (Goodreads)

I received an eARC of The Bromance Book Club in exchange for an honest review.

It needs some trigger warnings for alcohol use, parental neglect, the memory of bullying for a speech impediment, and snide comments by a non-main character about said speech impediment.

I loved a lot about this book - the way it dealt with how family trauma affects your current familial, platonic and romantic relationships; the way the men all came together to say "no you're being a dick let's fix that"; even the challenges that came with being separated parents for the first part of the book.

The center of this book is in male friendships and I loved that so much. Friendships outside of the romantic couple, particularly between men, are still pretty rare in a lot of romance books. I loved the book club and all of the members. Even Braden-Fucking-Mack, who surprised me a lot.

I loved that Thea strove to go back to a truer version of herself and that Gavin wanted to support that, even if he didn't know how to show it before everything went to hell.

Before I finish this review, I want to talk about Gavin's stutter. Something you may not know about me if we haven't met in person is that I stammer and words get lost a lot. Sometimes when things get more emotional or overwhelming, I have to pull out my phone or a notebook and write down what I want to say because I just can't make them audible. I also tend to rely on quotes, templates, and things like it at times when I'm struggling with my words, which is something I saw Gavin doing throughout this book. It both broke my heart and helped heal it a little bit, especially after the template discourse on Twitter the last few weeks. (If you don't know what I'm talking about, trust me, you're better off.)

Thea made it really clear why finding out that his words weren't his own hurt her feelings. By talking about it, Gavin made sure that she understood why he did it. And together, they built the confidence they needed to be able to trust each other. It was beautiful to me and gives me hope for their happily ever after.

Adams set us up for an enemies-to-lovers sequel with Liv and Mack which intrigues me. I would love to get more into Liv's head and see her flourish. I'd also love to see Mack get increasingly frustrated with not getting his usual response from women. I look forward to the sequel and anything else Adams puts out!

In case you couldn't tell, I loved this book. I highly recommend you pick this up if it appeals to you at all. You can pick up a copy through  Indiebound or Amazon!




Disclaimer: All links to Indiebound, The Book Depository and Amazon are affiliate links. If you buy through those links, I will make a small amount of money off of the sale.

This is one of the laugh-out-loud funniest books I have read in a while! The premise is refreshing (an all-male book club that focuses on a different romance novel at every meeting) and all of the trials and tribulations that go along with trying to help Gavin and Thea work on their relationship. I am also secretly hoping to read more about Mack and Liv in a future book! This is one of my favorite books I have read this year. Huge fan of this author!

Nashville Legends second baseman Gavin Scott’s marriage is in major league trouble. He’s recently discovered a humiliating secret: his wife Thea has always faked the Big O. When he loses his cool at the revelation, it’s the final straw on their already strained relationship. Thea asks for a divorce, and Gavin realizes he’s let his pride and fear get the better of him. Distraught and desperate, Gavin finds help from an unlikely source: a secret romance book club made up of Nashville’s top alpha men. With the help of their current read, a steamy Regency titled Courting the Countess, the guys coach Gavin on saving his marriage. review: I absolutely loved this unique, refreshing take on a second chance romance! At the core, this book is about two vulnerable people who are working through some deeply-seated issues that have affected their marriage in numerous ways. I think the author did a great job of weaving laugh-out-loud scenarios with real life problems that contained depth and emotion. Gavin’s character was my favorite – he was flawed, authentic, funny, and helplessly lost at times! I’m already looking forward to the second book! rating: 5 out of 5 ⭐️

This book was a hoot. I was in a slump of the worst kind - starting multiple books and enjoying them, but inevitably not finishing them because I didn't have the time or energy.
This book interested me and made me laugh every time I saw the title or cover. I figured, "Why not start it now? What's the worst it could do?"
The answer is that it could give me a reason to stop listening to the influx of podcasts I downloaded.

When Thea asks her baseball star husband for a divorce, he'll do anything to get her back. And luckily, his teammates know exactly what it takes. Before he can blink, Gavin finds himself the newest member of a secret book club where men read romance novels to improve their relationships. Can lessons gleaned from a regency romance help Gavin win Thea over?

I smiled so hard reading this book. I love the meta nature of it, with chapters of fictional regency romance novel Courting the Countess tucked into Gavin and Thea's story. This is such a clever take on the genre, and the whole concept of the Bromance Book Club is so endearing. Definitely worth a read for any romance lovers.

This was absolutely lovely. I'm always a sucker for second-chance romance, and this did not disappoint. Gavin and Thea really clicked as the main characters, and I loved all of the references to romance books. Can't wait for the sequel!

This is an unexpected romance. Gavin, our hero, is the main voice we hear in this story which was interesting. I liked the different perspective and how fun it was to hear about the “bromance” book club. Gavin and Thea married young and at 25 with school age twins, they realized they’ve lied for most of their relationship. It was interesting to see how a couple could attempt to rebuild their marriage and this novel takes you to tough places while also placing a band aid over the hurts it also delivers. It is a blend of cheesy romantic lines that are delivered to his wife as he tries to woo her back. With botched date nights, hilarious attempts at “date-rescue” by his friends and the rekindling of their chemistry.

I enjoyed the flipped story with the men in the story reading the romance novels and helping each other improve their relationships. It was good to see a couple work through their problems, with humor to lighten the story.

Gavin Scott’s life looks perfect from the outside: major league baseball player, beautiful loving wife, and adorable twin girls. All that comes to a screeching halt when he finds out his wife, Thea, has been faking a lot of things in order to be the perfect wife. She gave up just about everyone of her dreams to support his career. He had been so self-absorbed that Gavin totally missed Thea’s unhappiness until everything about their marriage and life implodes.

Gavin’s teammates and friends, some of them irritating like Mack, come to his rescue with an unlikely plan that at first, seems too ludicrous to be believed. They have a very secret men only book club that uses romance novels to figure out what the women they love truly desire in a relationship. Gavin is less than enthusiastic but agrees giving it a try as a last-ditch effort to save his marriage. The story within the story is a Regency novel Gavin is tasked with reading called COURTING THE COUNTESS making for an interesting juxtaposition for the modern day man.

Thea comes from a very hurtful background parent-wise so she has no good role models for dealing with problems in a marriage. Her sister, Liv, who has been staying in the house since Gavin left, has a very dim view of men adding a kind of toxic element to the mix. Though they are very close, Liv is as much a hindrance as a help to Thea.

Both Gavin and Thea have some major baggage to deal with before they can ever move forward or recapture the early magic of their relationship. Several challenges abound including their quick marriage after only being together a short time because Thea got pregnant and then Gavin’s career took off foisting them into a public life. Thea also has to put up with being in the women’s team support group which is filled with unkind, gossiping mean girls who give all of us a bad name.

This story is quite cleverly done, so much so in many respects, it makes me wish this book club was a reality more than humorous fiction. How often have we women wished men understood why romance books call to us so strongly? Ms. Adams story has a lot to recommend for it including clever writing, an imaginative story line, and laugh out loud moments. I very much look forward to the caustic Liz and equally annoying Mack’s story. I think readers will be in for a real treat.

Completely charming. I found myself smiling a lot as I read this book. If only people (not just men) IRL were as open to considering the well-meaning advice of their friends....

An exploration of how a marriage can fall apart and the long, hard, work of slowly rebuilding it through persistence, openness, a willingness to learn, and, of course, the guidance of romance novels.