For those who are, or have found themselves a part of the ongoing struggle with romancelandia and the RWA and the lack of diverse and poc authors, Therese Beharrie is a breath of fresh air.
As a Woman of Colour, who writes books about people of colour, who uses her voice to shine a light on her community, and representation she is extraordinary. Beyond that, she is an author who writes the books that Romance readers want.
Although I wish that I’d realised that this was part of an over-arching story of sisters, and binged on the first two books, I loved it.
Therese creates characters that the reader (or at least I) identify with, and want to see find a hea.
She has stepped away from the idea of the unobtainable, selfish, solitary man, and given us a hero that- let’s be honest- most of us would be totally crushing on.
Beharrie’s ability to write male characters that the reader cares about as much as the female is a gift.
I hope that she keeps on giving, and also I will be ordering books one and two

This book was wonderful. Zoey and Sawyer's love story really held me. They had so much going on. The friends to lovers and fake relationship aspect of the story was great. I liked the format of the book, going back and forth between the past and the present. Very good character development. I loved the ending. I loved how they joked with each other.
Simply a great book.

There's a lot going on in this book! It has two timelines with alternating chapters, a fake dating trope and a second chance trope because of a hasty marriage. All with the same couple! But it's very grounded in emotion, and even with all the tropes, it doesn't feel zany. What really resonated with me are the rash decisions people can make when they are struggling, and how people can beat themselves up for a long time instead of opening up to people who love them. I'm more interested in those ideas than the kinds of critiques they might get, i.e. "those actions were out of character" and "they could solve this with a simple conversation." Because real people aren't characters, and simple conversations are rarely simple when emotions run high! Ultimately this is a different type of romance than I usually reach for, but I'm glad I did. It's a story to remind us that love is worth struggling for, and that complicated people deserve love.

***Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for providing a copy in exchange for my honest review.

This was my first Therese Beharrie, but it definitely will not be my last. I don't know that I've ever read a book with quite this mashup of tropes, which worked because we got to see, with a non-linear timeline, our main couple progress through so many stages of their relationship. It's difficult to review this book though because I don't want to spoil literally anything because seeing how things unfold was really, really magnificent. Kate Clayborn tweeted about this book actually, so go find her thoughts if you want someone to articulate well how skillfully Beharrie weaves this book together.

So what I am going to talk about is the feelings this book gives me. Second chance romance is a trope I really struggle with for multiple reasons, usually centered around forgiveness of the person who wronged the other. This book left me no room to not feel so deeply empathetic with Zoey, to not fully understand her decision to leave Sawyer, while also letting me feel the sense of betrayal Sawyer felt in the being left. These two beautiful characters love each other so much and you can feel that and you can see it. There's a deep sense of loss that both of them feel because they haven't been part of one another's lives for a couple of years. In other words, what I'm telling you is that if you want to feel all the things, pick up THIS book.

I will say that I think I would have loved this even more if I had read the first two books in the series first, but it did read just fine as a standalone.

Thanks to Netgalley and the Carina Press for the opportunity to read this beautiful book early! Now to go buy the first two books in the series...

One Last Chance by Therese Beharrie is a friends to lovers second chance romance. Zoey and Sawyer were friends for years with Zoey often pretending to be Sawyer’s girlfriend. Things started changing however, when Zoey finds out that Sawyer has been secretly in love with her for years.

From the first page, it’s pretty obvious that this author excels at character driven stories and I also really enjoyed the banter between the characters. I particularly enjoyed Zoey’s wit and personality! The scénario that forced proximity between Zoey and Sawyer also had me giggling non-stop.

This is my first book by the author and have not read the earlier books in this series. Unfortunately, my experience suffered as there was a few scenes where I felt that I was missing context. I felt this mostly around Zoey as we are told that she was previously irresponsible and self-centred but I did not really see much evidence of this within the four corners of this book. Another scene that suggested to me that this book might not work as well as a stand-alone was a lone scene that had zero relevance to the main characters, but would probably delight readers who have read the previous books.

This book is set up to have alternating chapters between flashbacks and current day, and honestly I really do not enjoy this kind of device as with this book I felt that the story lost its forward momentum. However, your mileage may vary.

Overall, I struggled a bit with this book but still enjoyed the characters and dialogue.

I had to sit with this one for a while. I enjoy Therese Beharrie’s writing so much, but the structure of One Last Chance was a struggle for me at first. By the end of the book I was genuinely in love with it.

One Last Chance is the final book in Beharrie’s One Day to Forever series about the Roux sisters. I have only read the last two books, and I think they are pretty stand alone. After a long illness, their father has died which sends each of the sisters into their own sort of tailspin. Beharrie does a wonderful job of exploring the lingering impact of grief and the way people handle it differently.

Zoey Roux is the baby of the family and she saw her role as the happy, impulsive sister. In an attempt to avoid her feelings right after her father’s death, she jumped into a marriage with her best friend Sawyer, who has his own grief issues, having been orphaned young. Zoey left Sawyer after three months, but the pair never divorced. Six years later, Zoey has grown and matured and asks Sawyer for a divorce. Over the course of a day in which they are forced together several times, they talk through their marriage, why she left, and how they feel about each other. Inter cut with the day are events from their past.

Initially, I was frustrated with the flashbacks. As I read, I saw what Beharrie was doing – showing how two good people could hurt each other without either being a bad guy. The difficulty with second chance romances and marriage in trouble romances is illustrating a conflict significant enough to separate the characters and showing the growth that makes a Happily Ever After believable. To give nuance and depth to the conflict between Zoey and Sawyer, Beharrie needed to show those moments that led to their marriage and their separation and I needed to see the years long connection between them to believe that asking for a divorce after a 6 year separation would be painful. The whole story woven together is a lovely and redemptive look at grief and the importance of letting ourselves and others feel our feeling.

If you haven’t read Therese Beharrie yet, I strongly encourage you to do so. In One Day to Fall and One Last Chance, Beharrie sends you on a roller coaster ride with women who are very much themselves and the men who love them for it.

Therese Beharrie finishes off her One Day to Forever trilogy with the final Roux sister, Zoey, and her second-chance romance with her former best friend (but still her husband) Sawyer. Therese always takes the reader on an emotional journey with her characters, and this book is no exception. There's such an immediacy of emotions that when Sawyer is processing how he feels seeing Zoey again, you feel right there with him (and it's in third person past tense, but even with that narrative distance, the reader is still completely in the moment). Sawyer will definitely be in the running for my favourite heroes of 2020 - he's patient and gentle and kind, and readers will swoon over him. It's harder to get on board with Zoey because her impulsivity isn't well-grounded early on so her impulse to get married immediately feels somewhat foreign. And her lack of transparency in why she chose to leave the marriage doesn't get enough attention - there needed to be more of a grovel for me. The chemistry between them, though, is undeniable, and this is a lovely end to the series.

Zoey and Sawyer were best friends until they married. The haven’t seen much of each other in the last 6 years until they run into one another at an event. But they are still married! The story is told passing between the past and the present. It is a plot device that works wonderfully for a book with such a backstory. The main characters are realistic and the dialogue also moves the story further. The secondary characters are well drawn. I would recommend this book to my patrons.