I went into this book quite nervously as A Question of Us was one of my favourite books of last year. I can gladly say that this book did not disappoint. I absolutely loved this book and quickly found myself loving the characters, especially Robyn and Will.

Whilst I wasn’t sure about the whole twin brother situation, Will and Ash were completely different characters and I feel like Mary Jayne Baker did an excellent job in making the two have their own personalities. Robyn is such a fun character and I loved her relationship with her Aunty Fliss. I loved how confident she became and how invested she became in the club and everyone’s feelings.

Talking about the club, I loved the idea of this club and the wide range of characters in introduced. They were all so interesting and brought so much to the book. I loved how open everyone was about their lives and I loved all the little secrets that came out. Another thing I love about this book is how unapologetically British this book is. I love the use of slang and it honestly makes a difference because I tend to read a lot of contemporary based in the US.

This book gave me a rollercoaster of emotions and had me crying at points, especially nearer the end but it also made me laugh and smile. This was a beautiful, funny, feel-good romance that had me hooked from the very beginning. Mary Jayne Baker has this incredible way of creating characters that you wish you knew in real life. I cannot wait for her next book and recommend picking Never Have I Ever!

Thank you to NetGalley and Aria for providing me with a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

Will and Robyn have known each other forever. Grown-up next to each other and been best friends for years - until Will's identical twin mucked it all up. Now they are just learning to be friends again - in time for said twin to return home. This was a gut-wrenching, rom-com with some twin brothers, friends to lovers and a love triangle - all with the backdrop of the real story: learning to live - really live.

Robyn Bloom feels a bit stuck in her life when a health scare - scares her right into starting a club all based on ticking things off the bucket list. She along with her ride or die besties and a set of twins that are really each their own headache try everything from sailing to burlesque dancing. Will and Ash are both heroes in the story in their own right. Will is the quintessential boy next door that is the stolid, calm town GP and the twin that has it all together. Ash is the fun one though. - and who doesn't love the fun one? (Honestly - I found him to be a prat for the most part but either he grew on me or grew as a character... I am still not convinced of which.)

Definitely more women's fiction or relationship fiction than steamy romance. It is a great read and a solidly good time!

I received an ARC via Netgalley from the publisher. This did not affect my review.

The premise of this book is Robyn Bloom's boyfriend, Ash, has left her out of the blue to move to Australia where he began a relationship with a much younger model named Melinda. Robyn was devastated. She has a health scare pretty early in the book, and her doctor is Will, her ex-boyfriend's twin brother. Everything turns out okay, but Robyn has a hard time being friends with Will since he looks identical to someone she despises. Throughout the book their friendship grows, but Ash unexpectedly shows back up, and throws a kink into their friendship/budding relationship. Ash realizes he has made a mistake leaving Robyn, and wants to win her back. Will, being loyal to his brother, starts to hide his feelings for Robyn.

I have a few thoughts on this book. I had some problems with some of the language because I am from the US, and not British. I initially had problems with the word cow being used to describe the heroine, because here it is used as an insult, but I reached out to someone from Britain and they gave me an explanation on what it means in Britain. I can deal with it, but it was problematic for me before I knew what it meant. Also, some of the paragraphs for confusing where dialogue would switch back and forth without ever say who was talking.

Now, onto what I liked about the book. I really enjoyed Robyn and Will's relationship. I was really rooting for Will at the end! He was so miserable, and he pined so much for her. I just wish he had said "Screw my brother. This is my happiness, and I'm going for it." Ash was a complete loser in the beginning, but he really redeemed himself BIG TIME at the end. I was impressed with his growth. The dialogue was upbeat and entertaining, and the secondary characters added a lot of depth!

Overall this was an enjoyable read, once you got used to the characters. I liked the idea of the actually club, and how they did things off there bucket list, makes me inspired to start mine own!

REALLY A 3.5 RATING FOR ME

Robyn lives in a small town in England. She has a possible cancer scare and the only doctor available to examine her is one of her best friends. The exam is a pelvic.

Will lives next door to her. His identical twin dumped her, exited to Australia and found a young girl who made him extremely happy. Since his brother left her, Robyn has found it nearly impossible to speak to Will because of his identical face to his twin.

It turns out that there is no cancer, and she and Will have at least been able to talk. He has been her friend since they were children and that should not change, no matter what a rat his brother Ash is.

After serving food at a senior’s meeting, Robyn has a brilliant idea for the community.

She starts a Never Have I Ever Club. Everyone is encouraged to think of things they have always wanted to do. It may be a group effort or an individual thing but there will be plans for events which inspire people to step out of their comfort zone.

It is not just for seniors, Robyn, Will and her two other close friends, Freya and Eliot attend. But, it is a few of the seniors who bring the meeting to a near standstill. The Fifty Shades of Grey Film has had a wider swath of influence than imagined.

This is a beautifully written story. I will admit that I would have liked a more tightly written book. It seemed at times to be very, very long.

Robyn, Will and their friends are wonderful characters. Everyone is simply trying to move forward in life and find happiness. All of them have been friends forever. They know and understand one another and they love one another. There is affection between the seniors and the younger generation as well. The small town citizens care about one another and it shows.

When Ash returns home, he plans to do a little sweet talking and be right back with Robyn. He seems a little shocked that her anger runs so deeply. And Will finds that he is a little shocked to find that he cares for Robyn. But, his family ties will not allow him to be anything but loyal to Ash.

Robyn is a strong woman who after finally getting over her broken heart realizes her own power.

Will is a charming and caring and lovely man. I became a little tired of Will’s continued support of Ash even when he realized that Ash behaved like a spoiled brat.

Robyn, Will and their friends, her Aunt Fliss and Aunt Fliss’ latest love are all people who have a way with words. The dialog is absolutely lovely. There is wit. There is humor all over the place. There is also an underlying sense of truth with that humor.

Ms Baker has created the atmosphere of a small village populated by wonderful people. Her characters are fully developed people and there is never a time when the reader does not recognize those characters as people we all know and like.

I received this book from the publisher through NetGalley. I am voluntarily writing this review and all opinions are completely my own.

Thank You NetGalley and Aria for allowing me to read the digital advance copy of this book. This is a first time I've read anything by Jayne Baker and I did enjoy the read. I truly do love all books with a UK setting , this one however even though I enjoyed the story it was sometimes a little hard for me to follow of catch some meanings. It's just because I'm just from the States and just cause I love everything UK doesn't mean I understand the slang and all it's language. But even with that said I loved this story's love triangle. I loved to see the growth in Ash and the love that the two brothers had for one another. I loved that each character in the book each played a huge roll and each character evolved as the book went on. Not one person didn't grow and come into their own with their own happy ending.

Once started, this book was difficult to put down. The town and characters draw you in from the start. The story was funny and fluffy with just enough drama.

4.5 stars

From the description and the cover of this book (yes I know you shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover but come on, this one is so cute!) I had high expectation and was not disappointed at all. I had such fun reading it!

It is such a cute story about adventures, living and loving life. It had me laughing, smiling, and a few tears were shed during particularly tender moments. All of their characters are unique and well defined, especially the twins. The storyline means there was never a dull moment and the romance was adorable.

Contemporary book lovers will devour this story, and even the most weary of readers will smile.

***Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Expected release date June 18, 2020.***

3 - 3.5 stars

This was a cute book. I loved the small-town feel, coming from one myself. The irony is that I never really connected with the 3 main characters (twin brothers and their friend/love interest), but had ALL sorts of feels for the secondary characters. I would have enjoyed reading more about the "never have I ever" part of the club.

Never have I ever felt lukewarm about a Softboi™ male lead. Well, drink up folks, because today, we've broken the streak.

If I had to name one strength this book has, it would be in the dialogue. Most - if not all - of the characters have a great sense of humor, and the banter flows naturally. The effectiveness of the exchanges of wit and humor made the chemistry in the various relationships believable. If nothing else, The Never Have I Ever Club makes for a decent light read for the levity it provides.

However, there is unfortunately such thing as too much of a good thing. The ratio of dialogue to narration in this book is skewed so far towards dialogue, it was almost distracting to notice. I began to get the sense very early on that the narration seemed only to serve one of two purposes: a vehicle with which to move from one chunk of dialogue to the next, or an introspective account of deep inner feelings. It didn't seem to register to me that the narration was being utilized well to actually display character activity.

Perhaps this is why I felt as though this book suffers from a common issue I find with romcoms I'm unsatisfied with: the book tells rather than shows, and I end up feeling a disconnect from any character development because I don't get to actually see what's going inside the characters' heads. Yet strangely, due to the effectiveness of the dialogue, I felt this dichotomy I haven't experienced with other similarly flawed romcoms, wherein this time, I could believe the feelings that people were experiencing; however, I just found that I didn't really care. Being unable to glimpse the actual goings-on inside the characters' heads and only seeing them filtered through dialogue - however serviceable that dialogue may be - meant that while the characters' emotional development made sense in theory, my perception of their feelings was tepid and watered down. I just could never get a good enough grasp of who these people were to ever feel fully connected to them.

Another drawback to the book being so dialogue-heavy is that most of the exposition ended up having to be provided via dialogue, which doesn't necessarily lead to the most natural conversations between characters. Perhaps it's because "dialogue exposition" is one of my pet peeves, and so I'm more inclined to notice its occurrences, but I saw it a lot here. It's a difficult balance to weave in exposition into characters' conversations, and you can only insert so much at a time before the dialogue becomes wholly unnatural. What that means for this book is that exposition ended up having to be doled out at a slower pace than would be otherwise had the book utilized narration more. The exposition was also more obvious this way - the details came out in bigger chunks in an effort to get relevant information out of the way all at once. The result was that even at over halfway into the book, I ended up still feeling like I was being introduced to the story, waiting for the plot to get rolling.

Although I can't blame the sensation of a standstill plot entirely on the lack of narration. A big reason I didn't feel like the plot had kicked in yet was because of the love interest, Will. Look, I love a nice guy - my favorite types of male characters are the Softbois™. Anyone who knows me knows it. But there's a difference between "soft" and "no backbone". It's one thing to be a nice person who loves his brother and want happiness for him. It's another to let said brother essentially just walk all over him. In the end, I did support Will and Robyn ending up together, simply because I liked how they were together. However, it became really hard to support the man when he continually went all in on hyping Ash up to Robyn and coaching Ash on how best to make it up to her. I love a nice man. I do not love a man who won't take a single stand for the woman he supposedly loves and instead wraps her up in a nice bow for someone else.

Even the glimpses into Will's head whenever the narration switched to his point of view didn't help his case much, but that likely had to do with the recurring dialogue-narration ratio issue. In fact, I don't know if I could argue that the POV switches were even necessary, looking at how much comparative narrative payoff the reader receives - especially when the POV seemingly switches out mid-paragraph to someone else's. They're odd choices and would be more likely to confuse a reader than to offer imperative insight into a character's mind.

Despite my criticisms though, I found the book to be an okay enough read. Most of the issues that I had were more pet peeves or relatively minor concerns. Once I accepted them for what they were, it wasn't difficult to breeze through the pages. The only problem I had big enough to warrant me nearly rating this book as 2 stars was the pushover attitude Will displayed. Logically, I understand his dilemma of not being able to date his brother's ex - but in what world is it logical to instead act as wingman for the other man, especially when you know the woman is uninterested? Will, please, you're better than that.

The Never Have I Ever Club was created for the purpose of taking chances, because you have but one life to live. It would have been really nice if Will could have taken that attitude to heart.

This was a super cute and fun story to read. For some reason I had a difficult time getting started with it - I would pick it up, put it down for a while, and then eventually come back to it. But it was really easy to pick back up and get back into the story, and once I fully got invested I finished it very quickly!

The sibling-love-triangle trope makes me feel uncomfortable a lot of the time, but in this case the maturity of all involved characters and the love they had for each other (friendly, familial, and romantic) really shone through and made it much more realistic and heartfelt. There was a great deal of character development, both with the characters in the love triangle and in the other side characters as well. Overall, an enjoyable read!

Okay this book was really fun to read. I've always hated the twin's love triangle trope but the author managed to write it creatively. Small town stories tend to become boring, but was a lot more focused on the characters and since all the characters were loveable and charming, it proved to be quite enjoyable.

I would recommend this to anyone looking for a mood lifting read.

I reallllly LOVED this one! It was a really enjoyable fun summer read! It gave me Jennifer Weiner vibes, and I loved how she was getting over her ex lover and living a fun life! Just as things were getting better what happens...Ash returned! Of course he would! Such a typical guy! But in the end I like the way everything went together.

Robyn Bloom thought her life was falling into place. Ash, the guy she thought was of her dreams was gearing up to move in with her, maybe even talk marriage and settling down. Until the next day when he gets cold feet, breaks up with her and decides to run away to the other side of the planet where a scant four weeks later he has shacked up with a woman ten years her junior. In an attempt to move on from him she develops a new club for her village - the Never Have I Ever club in which members are encouraged to try new things that they have wanted to but never actually done. And the club is a roaring success; people are trying out activities from their bucket lists in all manner of ways. And she develops a closeness to Will. They have been friends since school, but since Ash moved away, there is a new level of trust and understanding between them, and Robyn finds herself falling for him. Problem is, he’s Ash’s identical twin brother and the polar opposite of his self-centred brother. And suddenly Ash realises his mistake in giving up on Robyn and decides to move back home and reinstate himself in her life, putting Will in the uncomfortable middle. Will Robyn find true love with the true man of her dreams, or will they be wrenched apart because of loyalty to Ash?

This novel is a romance of the best kind, where there is no obvious answer to the dilemma until the very end of the story. In short, if you love the will they, won't they kind of novel, you will love this one. The characters are engaging and well written. You actually care about the situation Robyn and Will find themselves in and you see the problem that lies before Will incredibly clearly. The story never moves into a shmaltzy kind of style but stays modern and vibrant. And some of the scenes, such as where septuagenarians are talking about trying out BDSM because Fifty Shades of Grey is all the rage is just hilarious, and well as enlightened for talking about older adults as having a lively sex life rather than being washed up as people just waiting to drop dead. This is a warmhearted love triangle, Robyn is quirky and the relationship between Will and herself unfolds slowly, gently, rather than wham-bam kind of event and Ash’s growing up is not before time. Its never going to change the world, but this story is just what you need when you want a happy book to while away a few hours. And sometimes that’s exactly what you want and need from a novel.

One of the better romance novels.

Mary Jayne Baker’s The Never Have I Ever Club was such a fun and delightful read! I loved the story of Robyn Bloom and her friends. Robyn is reeling from a recent heart break by her lifelong friend and recent boyfriend, Ash. Ash broke her heart, fled to another country and traded her in for a younger model. Robyn has an entertaining social circle and in an effort to bring everyone together and get out of her “funk” they form together the Never Have I Ever Club. Collectively, this group of small town residents try out new experiences that they’ve always wanted to. Part of the group is Ash’s twin brother, Will. Robyn and Will have always been friendly, but his identical face makes it hard for Robyn to forget the pain caused by Ash. Just as Robyn starts to find her new groove, Ash is back and determined to win back her heart. I love a story that makes me laugh, cry and want to read late into the night and The Never Have I Ever Club checked all those boxes. Readers will delight in this sweet story of friendship, love, loss and finding our own path.

A sincere thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Well this was a really fun book to read.

It's not often I get to read about a pair of gorgeous twins, who clearly love each other, and in the case of Will, genuinely wants what is best for his brother, Ash, even if it breaks his own heart to do so.

Robyn has known the Barnes boys for years, but recently she is struggling to be around them, Ash is her ex and dumped her and moved to Australia, while Will due to being identical keeps remind her of Ash, but they love next door so avoidance is futile.

However things slowly change and Robyn spends a lot more time with Will, as they set up the Never Have I Ever club for the local community, a club to inspire its members to sieze the day, and try out new things they never have before.

I loved the idea and execution of this club, getting to meet many members of the village. There are some truly hilarious moments, including what one couple who are attending the club, who are pensioners, would like to try out, after reading one of the most popular books of the last decade!! Or the various older members of the group who are keen on revealing all manner of different things!

I adored this story, and really wasn't sure which twin would get his happy ending! I also enjoyed the romantic exploits of Robyn's other best friends, and also her aunty Fliss who is really fabulous too! It is just an all around good fun story, that I'm so glad I've read. I can now go to bed with a smile on my face, having stayed up far too late to finish this book!

Thank you to Aria and Netgalley for this copy which I have reviewed honestly and voluntarily.

This book was great! It was so easy to lose yourself in the story, and kept you turning pages to see what happened next! Will definitely be recommending!

This is a very cute engaging book. Great character development, each of them was endearing in their own way. Nice easy read.

Thank you for the advanced copy #Netgalley!

Robyn Bloom finds herself in a messy situation, she lives next door to a set of twins, one of which she dated and was dumped, Ash. Ash dumped her out of the blue then left the country, leaving his twin brother Will at the house. Robyn avoided Will as he looked identical to his and it was too hard to see. But a medical scare brought Robyn and Will together.

When Robyns friends eventually stop being single, Robyn has to find something new to keep her busy....she develops the Never Have I Ever club that unites a small town.

After I had a little time to marinate, I went from a 3.. to a 3.5. But I’m keeping it here rather then a 4 because it just didn’t quite reach that mark for me. There were a few parts that really rubbed me the wrong way, but over all the book was good. The characters were relatable, the storyline was intriguing enough to keep you reading, the groups interactions were hilarious. Trigger warning, cancer, cancer, and more cancer. It seemed like in their town, that’s all the apparently went wrong. And if support healing from crystals, this may not be for you. The friendships were both strong and yet somehow weak all at the same time. I was confused as to how people could be so forgiving to one but then spiteful to another. The emotions were a bit all over the place. There were a few times that I questioned whether I should finish it or if I would cave and DNF. over all, I’m glad I stuck with it. The love story, love triangle, and friend group brought it back home for me. I guess like life, we have annoyances but the people we love and are meant to have around will always find a way back but I can’t say I’ll necessarily be jumping at the chance to read any possible sequels.