This second book in Ruby Lang’s dazzling Uptown series (they stand perfectly wonderfully on their own, companions rather than a continuity) features a real-estate broker drowning in student debt and an accountant turned reluctant organizer, who square off over the fate of a renegade community garden in Harlem. It’s witty, it’s thoughtful, it’s a little bit of a heartbreaker. And it may be one of the best uses of the We Can’t Both Win trope that I have ever, ever seen.
We Can’t Both Win asks one of the most powerful questions in romance–or really in all philosophy: how do we resolve the unresolvable? Who has to compromise, to bend, to give in? And why? In romance the answer is always love, of course–but the characters can’t give in for generalized, abstract capital-L-Love. That’s a cop-out and we know it.
No, the best resolutions here involve something specific, and it has to be at least a little bit of a surprise for the reader. That’s how you get the deepest gut-punch of the emotional payoff.
This book gets it. No, I’m not going to spoil it for you. Just know that it was perfect and I wish I could reread it a thousand more times.
Ruby Lang continues to shine, her prose the best kind of snappy contemporary writing–and then it started knocking me flat on my ass. Magda and her perennially disappointed sisters. Oliver and his grumpy friendships with the elderly women gardeners. The stubbornness of grief, the struggle to get one’s life back on track, the way lust and attraction can blossom into affection and loyalty and joyful sacrifice.
And the sex scenes? Whooo boy. I was a wreck. There’s one in a blacked-out New York that I’m going to be thinking about for years to come.
If you need a little bit of springtime as the leaves begin to fall, this is the book to reach for.

Open House felt like a love letter to New York City in so many ways. Ruby does an excellent job of capturing the feel of New York, what these empty lot gardens feel like and how community springs up in unexpected ways amongst the concrete and glass. Magda and Tyson are two people who meet and are on opposite sides of an issue and their feelings complicate everything. The way Ruby intertwines their lives and the connections made feels very much like my NYC experience and I did wish that I could go to the garden on 136th St and see the characters in this book, but alas I'll just have to find a different lot garden in Harlem 💐🍅🥒🌻

I really enjoyed how through the course of the book both Tyson and Magda wrestled and came to terms with their own baggage without lashing out in unforgivable ways.

PSA: There's blackout sex as in sex during a blackout in an unexpected place and it is just as good as you're imagining 😁😁😁😁😁😁

There's lots of food mentioned throughout which I loved because food and seduction go hand in hand for me😍

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for a free eARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I thought that Open House was an extremely cute and steamy read. I straddled the fence on how I felt about it overall though. The meet cute between the two characters was just as cute as you would hope and the steamy bits were....whew. Yes! They were just as hot as I had hoped (and been promised) without them feeling too trashy or degrading, which can happen sometimes with novellas and sex scenes. This had both enemy to lovers and slightly slow burn feels. You could tell immediately that both characters were attracted to one another, but considering they were on opposite sides of the fence here (or garden I suppose) they refused to act on it until about halfway through the book. I wouldn't classify this as instalove since the good amount of time passes through the novel, even if we don't realize it at first. Their interactions were cute and I loved the old ladies in the garden. I also enjoyed the fact that gentrification was a big discussion within this book.

On the flip side, there seemed like there was too much going on here for a novella. There were a lot of sideplots: the selling of the house and the garden and all the background surround that, Magda's "failed" careers and issues with her sisters and mom, Magda's crotchety widowed uncle, Tyson's sister and family issues. All of these plots on there own were fine, but for a book that's less than 200 pages, it just seemed like a lot to fit in. By the time we reached the end I just wasn't invested in any of the side plots or the relationship. I think that the other sideplots would have worked out fine if there had been room to explore them in a large time frame. Also, Magda's sisters never seemed to understand what she was saying, even by the end of the story and that was the one side plot that I was actually interested in seeing resolved. There was also a really weird kitchen phone sex scene that was awkward and Magda's conversation with Tyson towards the end when he was going to move was...weird. It was instalove-esque in a story that hadn't seemed all that insta to begin with.

Overall, this was cute and I enjoyed it for the most part, I'd still recommend it, but I just think some things could've been a little better. In fact, if things had been explored a bit more, I may have loved it.

I requested Open House from #NetGalley on a whim. The cover is cute, and there were clearly diverse characters. Plus, the plot sounded fun. I had not read the previous book in the series, or anything else by Ruby Lang, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. Little did I know that Open House would end up being one of my favorite romances I’ve read this year.

I think what I love most about Open Season is how REAL it feels. Like I can almost smell the flowers in the garden. See the butterflies. Taste the heirloom tomatoes. Feel the sweat trickling down my back. I’m not a big fan of super descriptive “purple” prose, but this story didn’t feel like that. It just felt real, like descriptions were integrated into the story telling and relevant to what was happening. Characters were attractive, without being described as the most beautiful beauty who ever beautied. No one was a billionaire or even a millionaire. These were diverse, hard working people of color living mostly in Harlem (OK, Magda lived in Brooklyn, but she didn’t get to spend much time there, and certainly not in story.) who used public transit and cooked with family on weekends. Magda is a real estate agent struggling to master her trade, while weighed down with massive student debt (who can’t relate to that?) and lack of respect from her family (loving lack of respect, but still…). Tyson is a hard-working, quiet accountant who crunches numbers for work and shovels compost and runs at night for fun. Both have tight relationships with at least some of their families, but not a lot of time or energy for other close relationships/ friends, because reasons. And frankly I also found that relateable. It all just felt so incredibly possible, so much like people I could encounter, in NYC, or anywhere, facing situations normal people face all the time.

The diversity in this book is just beautiful too. Magda Ferrer and her family are Afro-Caribbean. They are described as attractive without being exoticized or othered. They’re portrayed as working professionals, such as lawyers and doctors, who love good food and time with family on their weekends and evenings. Magda also has a widowed uncle who is an African-American born and raised in Harlem. Tyson Yang is a more solitary figure, an apparently first generation Taiwanese-American who mentions at one point in the story that English was not his first language, who works as an accountant by day and hangs out with his younger sister and helps his local community garden, while trying to hold the actual gardeners at bay emotionally, on weekends and evenings. He’s a homeowner who loves his multi-cultural neighborhood in Harlem, and struggles with his attraction to Magda, not only because of the central conflict, but also because repeated loss has made him afraid of additional emotional attachments.

Even the conflict felt realistic. Possible. Messy. Complicated. Stressful. Community gardens often do pop up in urban areas on seemingly abandoned lots. There’s that intrinsic conflict of actual ownership vs the neighbors that have rehabbed the property and turned it into something beautiful and valuable to their community. And the conflict of those neighbors’ claims from their hard work, versus the realtors asked to do their jobs and sell the place for the absent owner. This situation could and certainly does happen, and the tension it causes between a sympathetic Magda, who nevertheless needs to do her job to earn an income, and a defensive Ty, who wants to protect the work of his neighbors he can’t admit are also friends, serves to realistically hinder a relationship between two attractive single adults who are otherwise drawn to and interested in each other. Their respective psychological issues also serve as realistic hindrances to their relationship.

I could go on and on about this book. The food from their families and neighborhood sounded amazing. Now I desperately want every kind of Chinese dumplings and pastilillos and every other ethnic food mentioned in this story. Even perfectly ripe heirloom tomatoes and half melted mint chocolate chip ice cream. If only I lived in a community where most of these were readily obtainable…

The sexual tension and the sex scenes were pretty terrific too. Not just sweet and hot, but different. Grounded in reality, without being the usual scenarios in romance novels. I don’t want to offer spoilers, but each scene was something different from each other and different from rote sex scenes in many romance novels, hot despite the potential distractions that real life so often offers, from uncomfortably warm temperatures to unyielding furniture surfaces to potential interruptions, and more. Whether it was Ty appreciating Magda’s unruly sweep of curly hair or Magda appreciating Tyson’s tanned and muscles wrists, hands, and arms, thanks to his outdoor work in the garden, their physical attraction and connection felt as organic as Mrs. E’s tomatoes, and their sexual encounters were as meaningful as satisfying.

Bottom line? This story was just utterly satisfying. Sweet and romantic and completely within the realm of possibility. Sexy and funny and creative. This is my idea of what a romance novel should be, reflecting American culture, in all its glorious diversity, as it is, and as good, and as a fitting place for love to bloom. I absolutely recommend this to anyone who appreciates a good romance novel, and cannot wait to go get my hands on more romances by Ruby Lang.

Thank you to #NetGally and Harlequin/ #CarinaPress for letting me read this delightful advanced reader’s copy of #OpenHouse in exchange for my honest opinion.

To see this and more reviews, please visit my website at www.onceaweekormore.wordpress.com

Why I am choosing so many disappointing romances lately? This story first off was so boring. I read a good romance over the course of about 2 days. This one was short and still a struggle. Magda mostly whined about her student loan debt. I didn't even get that because people live with student loan debt all the time and just go on. It's usually not crippling to anyone. If doesn't prevent you from living your best life. Just make your monthly payment and keep it trucking!

The sex scene was so dry! The flowery dialogue reminded me of fanfic! After that the story continued on it's boring journey so I ended up mostly skimming until the end. I thought the NY setting would give the book some personality but I didn't even get a good feel of how the neighborhood was despite this being a story about this small community. Where was the culture or personality?

And Madga was Afro-latina solely because being Afro-latina is trendy. I think we got one mention of her family being Puerto-Rican and a small mention about her Spanish not being great. But she didn't feel Puerto Rican and neither did her family when we met them. I live in a neighborhood full of Puerto Ricans and they have great pride. I didn't see any cultural touches during the family dinner scene. I hate when writers make characters black for diversity brownie points!

I recieved this arc from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I adored this story! Ruby Lang wrote wonderful characters that felt “real”. Their interactions and chemistry were superb. I can’t wait for what is coming next from this author!

This is such a wonderful contemporary romance with a great HEA that you will crave for.

Magda Ferrer’s career path has been one failure after another with a surmounting school loans. Now, Magda is focused on becoming a realtor and determined to succeed. Her goal is to sell the properties her broker trusted her with, and an uncle giving her a chance. Magda learns quickly that selling a property involves much more than just getting an offer from a buyer - it involves some complications like attachments to the property, memories made in the home, and sometimes an illegal community garden.

Tyson Yang an accountant helps with the community garden in Harlem. Along with the ladies in the neighborhood, they fix up a dirty trash ridden lot and transformed it into a beautiful garden the neighborhood is proud of. Ty represents the group into making an arrangement to buy and save the community garden.

Ty and Magda clearly on opposite sides develop a strong attraction for each other that is absolutely undeniable.

Ruby Lang creates wonderful depth in these cast of characters. I enjoyed their back stories, the funny scenarios, and dialogue. Ty and Magda are charming and their attraction heartwarming. It is a wonderful contemporary romance that is flirty, sexy and heart fluttering. I was absorbed into their lives and happy to be a part of their summer romance in Harlem!

Thank you @Harlequin Books and the author for providing a copy of the ebook. All opinions are my own.

I did enjoy this book . It is a quick read that is entertaining but it isn't one I would read again in the future.

This is a quick read about Madga and Ty who meet and become rivals due to the selling of a community garden. I enjoyed the backstory for both Madga and Ty but didn't feel any chemistry between the two characters. The plot is predictable, which is to be expected. I did enjoy the diversity of the characters in the book.

An advance review copy was provided in exchange for my honest review.

This short but sweet little romance was chock-full of life, love, and... conflict? Definitely a win on the enemies-to-lovers trope. Looking forward to Book #3 in the Uptown Series, due out 2/20/2020!!

Rating: 3.5 Stars

Magda was determined to make a sale and get out from under her student debt, and therefore, was excited to have the opportunity to sell a desirable lot. When she went to view the property, she discovered it was being used as a community garden. As if that was not enough to leave her conflicted about the sale, she also found she was attracted to one of the gardeners, Tyson. Could a love match survive, while they are on opposing sides?

This was my second Ruby Lang book, and I have now come to think of them as socially conscious romances. In this installment of the Uptown series, Lang takes on gentrification. I loved being in the neighborhood, and seeing the strong bonds formed between its residents. She showed the different types of beauty a community garden brings to the neighborhood, and I really enjoyed getting to visit the garden and meeting the gardeners.

Obviously, the stars of this story were the hero and the heroine. Both Magda and Ty were very likable, and each seemed to be looking for something. They weren't quite where they wanted to be, but they got a little closer once they found each other. The pairing was a good one. I thought the chemistry was great and their connection was unmistakable.

Although I felt like a lot of great things happened towards the end of the book, I still needed a little more there. I am one of those readers, who needs to see a bit further into the characters' futures, and I really needed it here, because of how many big changes were occurring.

Regardless, I still enjoyed this enemies-to-lovers romance, which emphasized the importance of connection, family, and community.

The character development in this novel was fantastic especially in how many pages the book was, I thought that both of the main characters' inner conflicts were well developed as well. As soon as I started reading the book I became enthralled and the plot was a very interesting idea and could have been wonderful had it been lived to its fullest potential. As I read on I started to become confused, the rate at which the main characters became friends and then lovers was alarming and highly inaccurate for a novel that seemed as if it was supposed to be a slow burn. I some what enjoyed the book, but overall it left me feeling like the story was written quickly and not entirely finished. I will be honest, what drew me to this book was the proclamation that it would have a happily ever after, and I felt as though there was a happy ending, but it wasn't a happily ever after. After I finished the novel, I sat there and stared at the author's thank you note and wondered where the epilogue was.

Sweet and wonderful. Truly a cute and simply well written love story with two characters that fit together so easily that I couldn't put the book down. I enjoyed the chemistry between the characters and I loved how easy they figured out what they wanted. Was a little disappointed to not see how Magda and her sisters relationship worked out but I loved everything else about this read!

Starts off a little boring but it was a good book. The characters were interesting and I liked the story.

In multiculturally-gentrifying Harlem, two people looking for a fresh start clash over their differing goals for a community garden.

Changes of mind, sisterly condescension, and money difficulties have led 29-year-old Magda Ferrer, the youngest in here Afro-Latina family, to shift her career goals yet again. Dropping out of culinary school because she can't put off repaying her undergrad student loans any longer, Magda's poised to give selling real estate estate a try. As the newbie at her agency, Magda gets handed the tough sells, including an abandoned Harlem lot which neighbors have (illegally) turned into a thriving community garden. And she's volunteered to agent a Harlem house owned by an uncle by marriage, a man whose nostalgia and grief keep him clinging to a property he's not inhabited for years.

After losing his mother to cancer, and his father to emigration, 32-year-old Taiwanese-American Tyson Yang is wary about getting too close to any of the folks in the local community garden who have "adopted" the lonely man. Or about getting involved in trying to save the garden when a sexy real estate broker announces that the lot on which the garden is located is now up for sale.

A power outage leads to an unexpected one-night stand between the two rivals, but both are reluctant to make anything more out of it—Magda, because she has to focus her attention on succeeding at her job, Ty because he doesn't want to get pulled in by a "half-together, moving-apart" dance after being burned emotionally in the past. But as the gardeners keep drawing Ty into their quest to save the garden, the two end up being thrown together, making it difficult for either to remember just why they shouldn't allow their wary liking to grow into something more.

This second book in Lang's new contemporary romance series is a bit longer than the novella-length <i>Playing House</i>, but at 40K words, it still feels less developed, and therefore less satisfying to this reader, than Lang's longer earlier romances.

B+ review for Open House by Ruby Lang: https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/reviews/open-house-by-ruby-lang/

Ruby Lang's "Open House" was a short, sweet, cute, and funny story. While it is technically the second book in Ms. Lang's Uptown series, it is a complete standalone, and it is not necessary to have read the first book to understand the events of this one.

I read and (mostly) enjoyed the first book in this series ("Playing House"), but I actually liked this one better because the characters seemed to be better developed, and the growth of the romantic relationship between main characters Magda and Tyson felt more natural to me. I especially liked Magda and found it easy to understand how her childhood and family situation drove her need to succeed in her real estate career, which was the main source of conflict in her burgeoning relationship with Tyson. Magda was a lot smarter and stronger than her mother and sisters gave her credit for, and I appreciated that she made the effort to stand up to them and demand to be treated like an adult even though it was difficult for her.

I found it tougher to relate to Tyson, especially at first, because I didn't feel like I got to know him as well as I did Magda. His mother's death clearly had a major impact on him, but I kept expecting there to be more to his story, like a bad breakup. At any rate, a number of the things he did and said seemed to come out of left field when they happened, even though most of them were explained later. An example is when Ty quit his job, which didn't make a lot of sense to me at the time because he had barely even mentioned his work up to that point, and I certainly never got the impression that he was unhappy there. (His decision to quit was explained later in the story, and it was a reasonable explanation, but still, I was frustrated at the time because there was no clear setup for it.)

Despite that (relatively minor) frustration, Magda and Tyson were both likeable lead characters, and the secondary characters were pretty great as well, especially Tyson's sister Jenny and Magda's Uncle Byron. Jenny had a great sense of humor (her joking description of the community garden as a "vegetable cartel" made me laugh out loud), and I could see her being featured in a future story of her own. (Uncle Byron's joke about the "socialist vegetables" was also pretty funny. There were some great one-liners in this book.)

Overall, I enjoyed this story, thought it was generally well-written, and would recommend it. I plan to pick up the next book in the series.

*ARC provided by the publisher via NetGalley. All opinions expressed are my own.

3.5 Stars / 2 Steam Fans

Sadly, this story fell a bit flat for me. I was looking for a cute, funny, and sweet romance; however, what I got was more like a women's fiction novella. Magda is drowning in debt, floundering with the direction of her life, and currently trying to sale her uncle's "historical" brownstone. While dealing with the push back from her uncle to sale; Magda's employer assigns her another lot to sell in the area. Magda visits this lot to find that the community has cleaned up the lot and started a community garden. Ty is a CPA that is bored with his life but enjoys helping the community garden and has become the face of the garden. When Magda and Ty meet the ladies of the garden they attempt to play matchmakers with these two. Although there is a romance between Magda and Ty I never really felt the chemistry and I also think that Magda and Ty's personal issues overshadowed the romance. I did like all the "walk-through" feel of a New York City's historic residential area that was provided.

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I read this as a standalone since I had not read the first in the series. It did make sense to read it this way. It was a quick romance novel and easy read. I always love an enemies to lovers romance and the story was very cute.

This is a Netgalley review. All opinions are solely my own.

Ruby Lang wrote a book that reads like I’m watching a movie. And it’s a movie I would watch. Magda and Ty are flawed characters that seem to be working against each other. Magda’s family are very realistic. Ty’s sister is super sweet.

I recommend this book that is movie worthy with a little bit of heat.