4 stars

You can read all of my reviews at Nerd Girl Loves Books.

This is a cute contemporary romance. The story revolves around a wedding planning business and the people that come within their sphere. For 20 years married couple Liv and Eliot have run a successful wedding planning business. Eliot dies suddenly and to Liv's surprise, leaves his half of the business to his young girlfriend Savannah. After getting off to a rocky start, Liv and Savannah start making a go of the business. The story follows Liv and Savannah as they move through grief and learn to love again. The book also follows other diverse couples as their relationships change and grow.

Liv and Savannah are great characters. They are smart, capable and learn to open themselves up to new experiences. Savannah dropped everything and moved to NYC with the dream of running the business with Liv and learns to push through her self-doubts and trust herself. As she learns new things about herself, she finds the courage to share her new life with her parents. This is a cute, fun, quick read that is the perfect feel-good book to read if you want a pick-me-up.

I received a complimentary copy of this book from NetGalley and Atria Books. All opinions are my own.

It had to Be You is a large-cast, ensemble story featuring a recently widowed wedding planner, Liv Goldenhorn, and the various people with whom she works. The individual stories threads are told in parallel timelines and loosely woven together as the story progresses.

The characters are each interesting, but I found I had the most invested in Liv. I loved her sense of humor, her acerbic wit, but most of all, I appreciated her ability to rebound and rise above the mess her husband left her upon his death. If your cheating husband leaves his half of the business to his way-too-young for him mistress, it would be really easy to pack up shop and wallow in self-pity for a decade or so.

Beyond the characters’ individual paths to love, some serious topics are brought up. Author Georgia Clark covers politics, racism, privilege and more without being too heavy handed about her messages. It Had to Be You is a well written, character-driven story that was a pleasure to read.

A novel about wedding planning in NYC? No I didn’t write this book, although I think could after planning my own wedding for the past two years. This was a sweet story about wedding planners in Brooklyn who come together in an unconventional way.

The story is about five couples around a weddings in Brooklyn. All the couples are related in a Valentine’s Day movie style. Liv and Savannah are the main two characters who co-own In love in New York, a wedding planning business and Liv has just met Savannah by finding out that she is the mistress to her late husband and he has left his half of the business to her. Savannah leaves Kentucky for the big city with dreams of making the business successful again. She has lined up a social media influencer’s huge wedding so they could get some much needed publicity.

It was a cute story, but I thought there were too many couples and the author spent too much time on some of them. I really wished we got to see more of Liv and Savannah and their business. I will say I did enjoy a lot of the LGBTQ themes in this novel and that was very refreshing to see. I wanted to like this book more than I did.

3.5 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

A novel about wedding planning in NYC? No I didn’t write this book, although I think could after planning my own wedding for the past two years. This was a sweet story about wedding planners in Brooklyn who come together in an unconventional way.

The story is about five couples around a weddings in Brooklyn. All the couples are related in a Valentine’s Day movie style. Liv and Savannah are the main two characters who co-own In love in New York, a wedding planning business and Liv has just met Savannah by finding out that she is the mistress to her late husband and he has left his half of the business to her. Savannah leaves Kentucky for the big city with dreams of making the business successful again. She has lined up a social media influencer’s huge wedding so they could get some much needed publicity.

It was a cute story, but I thought there were too many couples and the author spent too much time on some of them. I really wished we got to see more of Liv and Savannah and their business. I will say I did enjoy a lot of the LGBTQ themes in this novel and that was very refreshing to see. I wanted to like this book more than I did.

3.5 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️💫 rounded down

It Had to Be You by Georgia Clark was an amazing romance, which has turned out to be my favorite romance of the year! With the backdrop of New York City and a wedding planning company, I knew the story would be incredible, but it pulled me in from the very first chapter and I couldn't put it down. From a mom of two littles, I woke up EARLY every day to just read a bit more - in short, I sacrificed sleep to read this!! From the beautiful descriptions of scenery, to the low-steam (but just steamy enough) romantic scenes, I found Clark's storytelling to be enchanting but realistic. The story is sweet while also tackling subjects such as LGBTQ+ romances, racial equality, divorce, and death of a spouse. It Had to Be You was a romance with depth, which has me itching to read all of Georgia Clark's backlist. I will be buying my own copy and recommending my friends add this to their summer reading lists!

Liv Goldenhorn’s husband dies suddenly, but she is shocked to learn that he left half their wedding planning company to his much younger girlfriend, Savannah.

Liv must now find a way to run 𝘐𝘯 𝘓𝘰𝘷𝘦 𝘪𝘯 𝘕𝘦𝘸 𝘠𝘰𝘳𝘬 with the woman that had an affair with her husband. As Liv and Savannah try to plan weddings together, their friends and co-workers deal with life and finding love - even Liv.

I loved the larger cast of characters here. Each couple we follow has something different to offer: fake dating, celebrity relationships, second chances, and lots of diversity. Clark takes you on some highs and lows but leaves you feeling that, no matter how messy and complicated relationships are, when it’s love, it’s worth it.

Thank you to @atriabooks and @netgalley for this digital copy.

I really enjoyed the concept of this; however, the execution failed to wow me. I felt that the cast of characters was too vast, but not developed enough for me to care about them.

If you like Love Actually (or as I saw another person put it He’s Just Not that Into you), this book is for you. As I LOVE both I’m especially thankful to @netgalley and @atriabooks for a copy to read!
This book follows 5 (hope I am counting correctly from memory) couples after the death of Liv’s husband all who have a slight connection to each other. I loved how each story held my attention and near the end I couldn’t wait to see how each story would wrap up. It took me awhile to connect all the characters to their storylines (my memory isn’t what it used to be 🤣) but once I did I was hooked! This one is available now! Plus it has such a cute cover. 😍

3.5 stars. I received this book as an eARC from the author and Netgalley so thank you to them for allowing me to read it! These thoughts and opinions are my own.
I thought this book was cute and very reminiscent of the ensemble movies such as Valentines Day, He's just not that into you, etc. For years, Liv and her husband have run a wedding planning business in NYC, but now her husband has died and thrown Liv's world into a tailspin. She has a disastrous wedding that ruins her reputation and she sort of just sinks into a hole of despair. It's made even better when Savannah shows up at her door. Savannah didn't know Eliot (the husband) was married and they'd been having an affair and he left his half of the business to her, making her Liv's new partner. She's young and fresh and into social media, etc and she thinks she can revive the business. Liv is reluctant to say the least. I think Liv read as an older character than she actually was because she was so hardened. She has a young son and I kept being surprised by that. The book follows Liv and Savannah as they find friendship and try to rejuvenate the wedding planning business. We see more of their personal lives than the business side of things and we also see the lives of all of their vendors (a musician, florist, photographer, etc.) It jumped from storyline to storyline in a way that felt very similar to those ensemble movies and honestly I think it worked a little better in movie form than book, but it was still entertaining. There were a lot of balls in the air and she did a decent job juggling them but being able to see it visually would be a little clearer. I really appreciated the vast representation of queer relationships and the conversations around gender identity and sexuality.

This book had relatable characters for everyone. New York City is truly portrayed as a great melting pot, with lots of interesting and likable people.

This was a delightful book of love stories of all sorts, and somehow at least this reader was cheering for them all to find their happily-ever-after. When surprisingly cynical wedding planner Liv loses her husband—who is also her partner in their wedding planner business—she thinks her life will just be her and her son from there on out. But the girlfriend she didn’t know her husband had, until his unexpected death, shows up at her door, ready to enthusiastically take Eliot’s place as Liv’s new partner in the wedding planning business.

Luckily, getting the wedding planning business active again facilitates several perfectly adorable meetings between catering staff, entertainers, and the guests at the weddings that bring them all together. Unexpected couples are revealed, each charming and endearing in their own way, with their own amusing stories.

I found this book to be so fun and such a cozy summer romance read. I’d give it 4 out of 5 stars and recommend it for those who enjoy fun, contemporary romances, with great lasting friendships thrown in.

I needed tissues for the last few chapters. Will everyone? No. But this book struck me with some of the issues, like believing you could be forgiven for saying something bad. This book has sad parts, funny parts, happy parts and just wonderful parts. One thing that took getting used to was all the point of views, but Love Actually is a good way to think of it and if you know that going in, I think it will help. It annoyed me for awhile, but I got past it as you learn more about all of the characters. Once I accepted all switching around I fell into a great book. It was definitely an original story considering the main character, Liv, had to run the business she started with her husband, with her husband's mistress, after his death. At first, you recoil, much like Liv did, but Savannah ended up saving Liv in so many ways, so you just never know why people are in your orbit.

This book is so lovely. It gives you that "first spring day where you can smell the heat wafting through the air and birds are chirping and flowers appear on trees" feeling. It is heartfelt, it is diverse, and it is touching. The last few chapters had me teary.

Told from multiple points of view and covering various love stories, IT HAD TO BE YOU is about second chances, vulnerability, the complexity of relationships, and opening yourself up to love more real than you expected.

I will definitely read more from this author. Read if you like New Year's Day, The Holiday, and other feel-good romantic comedies with large casts.

Final note: the audio is read by a full cast!

REALLY Cute. A huge ensemble cast but great for rom-com fans & women's fiction fans alike. VERY inclusive - it really tried to include lots of different groups which I appreciated but felt a tad overdone? Overall I really enjoyed! 4-4.5 stars

I gave this one a good shot, but it really just wasn't for me. I loved the concept of a story following a bunch of different intertwining perspectives, but I got over half way through this and still didn't care about or feel connected to any of the characters. This had a lot of potential, but just wasn't quite the right fit for me as a reader. However, if you love a New York centered story or liked the movies Valentine's Day or New Year's Eve, you may still want to give this one a chance!

CW: death of a loved one, cheating, transphobia

The last book I read from Georgia Clark was The Bucket List. It was this beautiful story about a young woman who's been diagnosed with the BRCA gene that heightens her chances of developing breast cancer. Before she makes the decision for a life-saving double mastectomy, she creates a bucket list for her breasts. It was such a laugh out loud story with a serious undertone about life, love, and your breasts.

This time, Georgia Clark's returned with a new moniker; a rom-com writer. Putting herself in league with the thousands of other romance writers, does Georgia make the snuff? I think she does. The story starts with Liv and Savannah, but then it branches out to the friends and loved ones close to them and their relationships. It then goes even further out to the weddings Liv and Savannah work together and those unique relationships. It really makes you see how we all may be strangers to one another, but we are somehow interconnected. It's a beautiful thing!

Because with her humor, her incredible storytelling, and the connections she's developed with these humans, I think she's created herself a beautiful romance between five couples in New York City. And New York is its own character in the story as well. I'm originally from New York and the year of pandemic and not seeing my family has me a little downtrodden, but this book made me miss that city life so much. I nearly want to go back just to browse the bookstores and drink the coffee and people watch. And this story is very much people watching to the Nth degree.

The story interweaves ten lives in five relationships and each relationship is so different from the other. Each of the characters relate back to Liv or Savannah in some way, but they're all standouts on their own. And all of them have their own personalities. It's like Georgia Clark jumped into these people's heads and wrote down what she saw from there. There's honestly a little bit of something for everyone in here. Not only does she represent the entirety of New York, but she also represents the different kinds of love, the different kinds of relationships, and the different ways we expressed (and don't express) our emotions. There's the romance after divorce, the open relationship that wants more, the celebrity romance, the friends-to-lovers, fake dating/relationship. It's seriously a smorgasbord of rom-com stories that will tantalize you.

And while there are so many funny scenes, it also has a lot of heart. I loved that not only there were these romantic stories that were happening, but there were friendships being formed, people finding themselves, people coming to realizations they didn't see before, coming to terms with grief, and so much more.

Overall, this is such a wonderful story that left me with tears in my eyes and a big smile on my face. I'm not one for crying from romance novels, but this got me in the feels a few times. It's a satisfying story that will leave your weary soul just a bit perkier knowing that there's a happily ever after for everyone

2.5 stars

A blend of Four Weddings and a Funeral and Love, Actually, It Had to Be You is a rom-com novel almost begging to be made into a movie. It features a cast of characters whose lives and careers overlap at weddings around New York, each event giving them a new opportunity to deepen their relationships.

There’s a reason that this kind of setup is more common in movies than books, which is that it can be really difficult to follow so many characters and plotlines without visual cues. And, as in most ensemble movies, some characters are more fleshed out, while others appear in comparatively few scenes. I really wanted Liv—who is kind of the main character, but not entirely—to have a fully realized story, and was sometimes irritated by all the other plots getting in the way. In other words, I cared more about some couples than others. And while the book starts out with some cynicism and bite—Liv is a wedding planner who appears to be 100% over weddings—by the end it was saccharine sweet.

Georgia Clark is a solid writer and I liked some pairings enough that I kept reading to find out how their stories ended, but overall It Had to Be You just wasn’t the book for me. YMMV.

With a large cast of characters this book looks at all sorts of forms and types of love and relationships. From the basically main character, a widowed woman who is confronted by the sins of her husbands past before he died and it affects not only her personal life, but also her professional life. To many people in her circle, a waitress that often works for her wedding planning company to the long term dating gay couple that provides the florals for the weddings she plans. I enjoyed this cast of characters and it reminded me of those large ensemble television shows or movies, but I highly suggest a little note taking to keep everyone and their details together.

At first while reading this book, I was extremely confused as to who was what and who was related to whom, but once I got the hang of the extreme switches between characters from one chapter to another, the book read smoothly. I loved the interconnectedness of it all and I could see this book translating to a screen of sorts very easily. I tried hard to think throughout reading this book which storyline was my favorite, but I honestly enjoyed most to all of them. For me the most fun to read was Savannah Shipley as she was adjusting to life moving from Kentucky to New York City and trying so hard to achieve dreams that her parents didn't support and make the life she could have only imagined.

This was my first Georgia Clark read and I am excited that there are at least two more in her backlist that I am genuinely excited to read.

ARC provided by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

It Had To Be You was an enjoyable read from beginning to end. It was a romcom with multiple points of view and I loved every second of it. I could picture it perfectly in my head like a movie which is what some of the best books will make you do. This book was so charming and flowed very well despite the large ensemble, I couldn't get enough of them! If you are a fan of multiple points of view like me then you will definitely love to see such a heart warming story from all sorts of perspectives,

Liv and her husband, Eliot, run a successful wedding planning business together until his sudden death leaves her adrift. To make matters worse, a stranger shows up with a new copy of Eliot's will, claiming that she is Liv's new partner because she now owns half of In Love in New York. So now Liv is faced with running a business built around love with Savannah, her dead husband's mistress, not at all sure that she even knows what love is anymore. But as their business takes off, the two women form an unlikely alliance and by learning more about each other, discover a whole lot about themselves, too. Surrounded by the love stories of new couples and older loves of the people around them (including their clients as well as their florists, the DJ and wedding singer, and a regular catering waitress who works their events), Liv and Savannah figure out who they really are and what they really want, from life and from love.

Georgia Clark became a must-read author for me after The Bucket List, and I absolutely loved this one, too. It's a little lighter and fluffier than her previous book, but that's by no means a criticism. Sometimes you just want to escape into a happy story, and this is one with rich, compelling characters you fall in love with and want everything to work out for...and guess what, you can be pretty darn sure throughout that they will! That is amazingly reassuring and such a balm (especially coming off the year we've all had).

The story weaves together snapshots of 5 or 6 different couples in a very Love Actually-way, with the difference being that the focus is on romantic love here. There are parents and kids, siblings, friends, etc. but they are supporting characters provided as background. It's all about different ways people fall in love, stay in love, confess their love, and repair their love. There's a lot of diversity and representation here: Black, white, Asian, gay, straight, and trans people are all included, which was refreshing and great to read.

This has all the makings of a TV show or movie (I think there's something in the acknowledgements about the rights already being sold), and I really hope it gets there because it would be delightful! It's fun, it's got swoon, it's heartwarming, and it's real. I loved it!

**Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for the ARC in exchange for my honest review! **

Thank you @netgalley and @atriabooks for the ARC of this absolutely adorable book in exchange for an honest review!

When first saw some preliminary reviews comparing it to a mix of Love Actually & Valentine’s Day, I knew I had to read this!

IT HAD TO BE YOU features several romance stories all connected by Liv Goldenhorn’s wedding planning business, In Love in New York. I absolutely loved the diverse cast of characters and their individual stories. Sometimes I get confused when there are so many characters, but Clark did such an excellent job introducing each one of them in a way that lets them stand out and make an impression on the reader. This had such incredible messages and themes: self-acceptance, trust, love after grief, and more.

I absolutely would recommend to all contemporary romance lovers!! This will definitely be a favorite of mine for the month even though I’m only three books in!