Thank you @NetGalley and @StMartinsPress for this copy for my review. This one is 3.5 stars for me. In this insta-love tale of two would-be dentists, Harper is a career-focused woman on her way to becoming an oral surgeon and Dan is a legacy, who's in dental school more out of duty than desire. Things I liked: I really appreciated the mental health and jewish representation in this book. I loved Harper's friends, and how funny her and Dan were. Things that didn't work for me: It's a bit of a slow burn and for me, I wanted more smack you in the face passion, and sometimes Harper seemed a bit self-centered especially with her friends.

content warnings: loss of a loved one, sexism, mental health, anxiety disorder

My very favorite scene in any romance novel is when the walls come down, when the characters allow themselves to feel vulnerable. This book, with these characters who not only had walls but had shards of glass on top of those walls, just about killed me as I ached for them, I wept with them, and I felt all of their emotions deeply. Harper and Dan were the most delightful and yet the most wounded of any characters I’ve read in a long time. But it was their brokenness that made their love scenes zing, that made their passion ignite, that infused their banter and humor with warmth and heart.

I love this book so much!!! Eddings's storytelling is so fun and fresh, the characters' so authentic, and the mental health issues beautifully handled. I related a lot to Harper and the depiction of her anxiety, and love how readers are shown that you don't have to be perfect to be worthy of love like Harper and Dan's, and see characters who grow both individually and together. I really can't wait for what Eddings writes next!

This was so cute!!! I always say anytime a romance makes me tear up in the last quarter it's a good book because you know you've started to get invested into the characters and the story and everything and it is safe to say I definitely teared up around the 75% mark (and onwards!). Even though I loved this book and I really loved Harper (possibly one of my favourite romance heroines in a while) I did have some issues making it a less than perfect book. For starters I find in a lot of romance books romance writers find key phrases that they use over and over again throughout the book and I found the ones in this book very obvious and almost distracting (the one coming to the top of my head is the "heart beating outside of your chest" situation - and I do understand this is supposed to allude to an anxiety response but I feel like there was other ways to say it as well!). Randomly as well, Dan really lost me in the last quarter - he seemed like such a nice guy and then it was like a switch flipped for me and I was getting bad vibes from him ??? I don't know if that was only me but it was a little jarring! There are definitely some issues with this book but there was also so much good in it that I felt all mushy and warm while reading it and to me that's a sign of a good book!

Thank you so much NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the review copy! :)

It wasn't bad, but it felt very similar to The Love Hypothesis but dentist. Just got the same vibe was hard for me to not compare.

Dual narrative is so appreciated in a romance that both people have things they keep close to the vest. Having that insight as the reader is very enlightening. I will definitely be reading more of Mazey's books.

A Brush With Love is a unique debut novel from Mazey Eddings. It is the first book I've read that takes place in the high stress world of dental school. Harper is in her final year of dental school. She is driven and feels the need to be the best wanting to get into a surgical residency. She also suffers from severe anxiety that she masks from even her closest friends. She literally crashes into Dan who is a first year student but is her same age. The meet cute sets up their instant attraction but Harper is not interested in a romance because doesn't know where she will end up when she graduates. Dan has issues of his own. His first choice of study is finance/business and he was successful int it. But after the death of his renowned DDS father his mother pushed him towards dentistry.

What really get your attention is the focus on Harper's anxiety. The descriptions seem realistic and exhausting. Her fear of being labeled as having a mental illness is overwhelming to her. Dan is sweet but has flags of his own. I understood his frustration at his situations but didn't love his pushiness to be the one to pay for Harper, getting into a physical fight over her or that he ignores his mother for so long. (I don't love alpha males.) I'm not sure I would call this a traditional romance because most of the book is spent on figuring out and resolving their own issues. The getting together is icing on the cake. I also love Harper's friend group.

The chapters for the most part alternate between each characters POV and I like knowing each of their thoughts. Thank you to NetGalley and St Martin's Press for an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Extremely relatable. By the halfway point I felt like the characters were my friends and I was 100 % invested in the outcome. The author worked in some real issues such as anxiety and loss. While it was a romance and fits the formula, it didn't feel formulaic to me. I highly recommend this to romance lovers.

Super relatable!

First of all I would like to thank St. Martins publishing for giving me an arc. Thank you so much to the wonderful author, Mazey Eddings for giving me the wonderful opportunity of reading her work.

Trigger warning for this talks heavily of anxiety.

A Brush with Love is one of my most anticipated reads for 2022. It was recommended to me by my friend on bookstagram telling me that she remembered me when she received an arc of it last year. The book talks about two dental students, Harper and Dan, as they work their way on dental school. Harper is already on her last year preparing for internship while Dan was on his first year. I almost DNF this one because I though of the age gap of the two but thankfully both are the same age.

The book was so on point when it comes to explaining the struggles of a dentistry student. I am actually a dentistry student on her last year and I buddy read this with another friend of mine from school. The plot of dental school really sold me to this when I first read the synopsis because this is the first time I read such book. I love the description of how each day they spent in school is so on point on how things go to. As I mentioned this was heavy on the description of anxiety and I actually speechless on it. The struggles Harper have to go to in managing anxiety is close to life and how she battles her thoughts. She would constantly feels useless despite achieving so much. It is true that in college, we are not competing with other people but we are competing with ourselves specifically with our thoughts. The flow of the story is amazing and there are times I read one part over and over again and be like: "YES RELATABLE!" The love story of this was spicy. I'm quite new to adult romance and some parts had me rolling my eyes but thankfully there are parts that save it. Harper is full of lusty thoughts for Dan I must say.

Each characters were also exceptional. Harper was badass I must say. Her strength is on her skills and drive in achieving her dreams but anxiety is the one thing that's been eating her up on the inside. She describe herself as a honey mushroom. Harper is basically most of us, a student in general battling our inner thoughts. Her development on the story left me stunned. She battled so much her thoughts alone and shut herself out and it brought me joy when she finally surrendered and asked for help. Anxiety can serioulsly can eat us like that and I admire the author in portraying anxiety so on point. Dan on the other hand is such an absolute dream and this is the character that I highly relate with. A frustrated dentistry student following the footsteps of his father. Being forced on a course you hate or don't find any interest with is a pain. I've been crying so much that I need to pause every now and then.

There are some terms though that may have non-dentistry student readers reaching for the nearest medical dictionary.

I had doubts on this when I started and I one to originally give it a rating of 4 just because of those lusty moments and sexual tension but the storyline of it at it reached the end had me sobbing and begging for more. The year just started but I could say when it comes to adult romance that I've read so far, this is my absolute fave and it will have a special place in my heart.

I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a book set in a school set-up and talks about the reality of anxiety for students.

I really liked this one!! I listened to the audio version and the narrators were great at bringing the characters to life. The storyline itself was cute, the setting was different but I especially loved the friendship and dynamics between the friends. I will definitely look for more in the future by this author!

5⭐
R verging on NC-17 because this book was hot but I think some of it was the tension?!

This book hurt so good and I loved it and it was just amazing.

So I was a little nervous when I first saw this book because I am absolutely not a fan of going to the dentist or teeth or all of that stuff but after a few friends hyped this book up, I decided to give a shot and I am SO glad I listened. I absolutely adored this book and I will definitely be getting my own copy (high praise from this library gal!!).

Harper is a fourth year dentistry student waiting to learn where she'll be for residency while managing severe anxiety (chronic panic disorder) when she quite literally runs into a first year dentistry student, Dan. Harper doesn't want to date knowing she'll be moving in a few months but Dan wants to get to know her better so they settle on being just friends.

Do they stay just friends? Hell no!! And that is the fun of this book!! I loved all the yearning and Dan's smart ass comments as he waited for Harper to recognize her attraction to him. I loved this book as these two worked through their trauma and mental health and were able to fall in love through it all. This is probably one of my favorite representations of what it's like to crush on your friend EVER.

So yeah I loved this book, it was amazing. The mental health rep, the Jewish rep, the women in STEM rep, the friends to lovers of it all. It was amazing and I am obsessed and I think everyone should read this book so we can all talk about how amazing it is!!!


Also if there was ever a book about what it would have been like to date me in engineering school, it would be this one 😅

1.5 Stars
This book really didn’t work for me. The mental health and dental aspects were well represented, but everything else was a struggle. I would have stopped at my "do-or-die" 30% mark, but felt the need to give it more of a chance since it was an ARC. Instead of the story getting better for me, it only compounded the reasons I didn't care for it. It goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway. Reading is subjective and the following opinions are all based on my personal reading tastes.

First, the humor felt forced and the romance felt awkwardly paced. It was an odd mix of a rushed romance with a painful push/pull between the H/h. Their lusting after each other got old, especially with Harper's habit of suddenly shutting it all down because she was determined to stay in the “friend zone.” This happened numerous times and it led to the inconsistent pacing.

Dan was a nice book hero and I really felt for his familial backstory and what he felt he needed to do for his mom. The emotional manipulation by his parents was horrific and yet, I’ve seen it in real life. That got to me. His was definitely the stronger of the two narratives.

Harper didn’t appeal to me at all. There were definite positives to her character, but as a heroine for Dan, I didn’t see it. Maybe as a desperate grab for something in his life that wasn’t self-imposed drudgery, but not as a legitimate love interest. I admired Harper's scholarly and occupational drive, but that only made me more frustrated with her character when she battled back and forth with herself and Dan. Overall, she was extremely hot and cold. Not a favorite trait in a book heroine.

Another thing I didn't care for was the dialogues and internal monologues. Some of the dialogue made me cringe. Especially during the intimate and playful scenes. Who calls their young 20-something soon-to-be boyfriend their “lover” while in the midst of the grand gesture? Ugh, no. I just couldn’t embrace some of their dialogue during their supposed romantic moments and their love declarations were too fast in light of everything else.

The only things that felt original in this book were the dental school setting and the mental health depiction. As it was, I struggled through humor that tried too hard and a romance that I wasn’t at all feeling.

Audiobook notes: A few of the more dramatic scenes concerning Harper felt overdone and I’m going to put some of that blame on the audio narration. The female narrator had a tone with Harper that verged on melodramatic. If I considered the same scene with my own interpretation, it sounded better in my head. As a whole, I don't think the audio did the story any favors.

This book had some cute moments, I like the way the relationship of the two main characters unfold and I actually really liked all the dentist talk , I actually thoughts it was fun to hear all about what they did. This was a easy fun read .

What a fun and sweet debut from Mazey Eddings! Harper is completely focused on school and ensuring that she matches at a top oral surgery program. She has no time for anything else, especially not for romance. But all that changes when she literally comes crashing into Dan. Dan is a first-year dental student and even though he comes from a family of dentists, this has never been his passion.

Harper doesn’t see the point of starting a relationship especially when she is set to move in 5 months. But that does not stop her from wanting him in her life while she still can. The two quickly form a friendship with lots of pining from both sides. While it's clear that they both want more, Dan lets Harper set the pace.

I did have a few issues with the pacing of the book and the relationship between Dan and Harper. I’m not the biggest fan of insta-love and it was clear that they both started pining over the other from the start. I just wish we could have developed a friendship more from the start instead of in the middle of the book. But again that’s more of my preference. I will say that the chemistry between Dan and Harper was so palpable and I loved that so much! I also felt that Dan could have held Harper more accountable to the ways that she treated him, yes she made it clear that she didn’t want a relationship but she blurred those lines too often.

My absolute favorite part of this book was the portrayal of Harper and her anxiety. She wanted to keep it hidden from everyone in her life as a way to show her strength. As a reader with anxiety, I just wanted to see her in therapy working through it but I understand the reasons why she fought against it for so long. So seeing her being vulnerable when it came to her anxiety and getting help was a true shining point.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for this advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

SCREAMING AND CRYING THAT I FINISHED THIS BOOK! I loved the story, the characters, and everything and anything that was Harper and Dan’s story. I just loved them so much and their story. The portrayal of mental health awareness and mental illness was done so well I felt myself nodding in agreement a lot of the time. And the funny parts of this book? They had me cracking up so hard. I’m so sad I finished because I wanna live with Harper and Dan for a lot longer than I got to.

Give this book all the stars. 10 minimum.

Thank you to NetGalley for letting me read an ARC in exchange for my honest review. I already ordered my physical copy because I need to hold it in my hands asap.

2.5 stars, rounded up. There were several things I liked: the story concept, Harper and Dan (they’re backgrounds and the dynamic between them), and Judy. There was a lot of flirty banter, especially at the beginning of the book, that I enjoyed. However, this book was way steamier than what I prefer to read. The innuendos and sexual references were constant and all the characters (with the exception of Judy) were super horny. This book wasn’t my cup of tea, but may be a better fit for a different reader.

Thank you to NetGalley for my e-arc. All opinions here are my own.

This book earns 2.5 out of 5 stars from me, so I’m rounding up to 3 stars. There were several things I liked: the story concept, Harper and Dan (they’re backgrounds and the dynamic between them), and Judy. There was a lot of flirty banter, especially at the beginning of the book, that I enjoyed. However, this book was steamier than what I prefer to read. The innuendos were constant and all the characters (with the exception of Judy) were super horny. This book wasn’t my cup of tea, but may be a better fit for a different reader.

*Thank you to Netgalley, the author, and the publisher for an advanced copy of this book. All opinions are my own.

Source of book: NetGalley (thank you)
Relevant disclaimers: the author and I share an agent, and have talked a little
Please note: This review may not be reproduced or quoted, in whole or in part, without explicit consent from the author.

This is an effortlessly charming debut. Which is to say that A Brush With Love has a breezy assurance about it, which is genuinely impressive for a first book, but it is also clearly a first book. There are some issues with pacing, especially in the second half. And while it was consistent with the age and personality of the two leads that their romantic trajectory was so stop-and-start-back-and-forth I personally feel it could have been a little narratively smoother. Nevertheless, well-drawn main characters with strong chemistry, alongside an appealing supporting cast, help smooth over a lot of the first-book-itis and I really enjoyed my time with Dan and Harper

I also learned an awful lot about dental school and dental surgery which. Err. My teeth are sympathetically hurting and I have a whole new admiration for dentists.

The deal is here is that Harper is a brilliant, highly driven dental student, whose ambition both conceals and, to some degree, springs from the traumatic loss of her mother when she was young. By contrast, Dan is only at dental school to continue the legacy of his recently deceased father. A chance meeting involving some stairs and a dental mould bring Dan and Harper together, and the halting relationship that develops between them is both sweet and sincere. Being aged and grumpy, I did occasionally lose patience with their “I fancy you, but let’s be friends, except I fancy you, maybe I love you, let’s be friends, oh okay let’s bang” dynamic but I also remember having a lot of similarly patterned relationships in my early twenties.

I also felt the book made several intriguing choices when it came to both trauma and conflict. It’s kind of inevitable from the beginning of the book that Harper will need to come to some kind of reckoning with her mother’s death, her anxiety, and her need to make her life have meaning in the light of both. And equally inevitable that Dan isn’t supposed to be at dental school because he doesn’t want to be there, and he sucks at it (I can’t remember the last time I read about a romance hero failing at something, without eventually conquering that failure—it’s rather refreshing). But while these elements ultimately drive Harper and Dan apart, the way they’re resolved occurs completely separate from the relationship. Harper gets her residency and starts therapy.

Dan, meanwhile, is liberated from dental school because his mother finally recognises that she was allowing her husband to dictate the future of the family from beyond the grave. I did, actually, love the scene with Dan’s mother—to me, it felt like a really nuanced take on loving someone who treats you badly—but it did mean that Dan’s entire arc was giving up his agency out of duty and then getting his agency returned to him by someone else. I mean, I know that’s how life goes sometimes but it left Dan as a somewhat static-seeming character compared to Harper. On top of which, Dan never seemed quite sure whether he was a soft boy who was happy to support the women around him, or a white knight who shouted at sexist old men on their behalf (despite being explicitly asked not to). Maybe you can do both. I don’t know.

Harper’s kind of great though: a sort of study in competence porn, dental puns, and emotional turmoil all at the same time. I think that was probably my favourite aspect of A Brush with Love—it’s acceptance of vulnerability, and its willingness to allow its characters to shine, not just in spite of that vulnerability, but because of it.

Edit: I just want to add a bit more context to my comments about the pacing issues and what I described as the uneven progression of the relationship. At the time of writing the review I rather glossed over these aspects of the story because it’s a debut so I preferred to focus on celebrating what I really loved about the story, over what didn’t quite come together for me. However, retrospectively, I can see that this vagueness has been unfair both to me and to the book, so I’ll expand a little now.

The first thing to say is that I’m aware we’re dealing with a heroine with significant mental health issues and that writing ND characters authentically is a complicated business, as is writing any character of marginalised identity. I’ve written extensively about the fact a lot of the tropes and expectations of the romance genre are founded on an assumption of a white cis straight neurotypical allosexual default, which means that there’s often resistance to stories where one or more the characters diverge from this default (along any axis) because what those stories look like might not be as instinctively recognisable as stories that do.

And, obviously, as a reader I do my best to come at stories with as much awareness of my own privilege as I can manage—which is not, of course, to say that I always succeed, even when I share commonalities with particular characters (as I do in the case of Harper). But to briefly re-litigate the issue I raised about the relationship feeling uneven in its progression, this was not, for me, about the expectation that a fictional romantic relationship needs to unfold as a smooth linear curve from strangers-to-partners or even that fictional romantic relationship involving ND participants needs to mimic the trajectory of relationships between NT participants. Why the relationship progression between Dan and Harper felt uneven to me (emphasis very much on 'to me') was because the story occasionally left me unsure what was underpinning its various and ebbs and flows, in terms of where each character was emotionally and psychologically. And, obviously a lot of the time the answer to that could be intuited as “Dan was attempting to respect Harper’s wishes by letting her set the pace” and “Harper’s reactions were driven by her anxiety” but the rule of perception applies to books as well as other media: if something isn’t on page, and there aren’t explicit markers within the text to indicate it’s there, it doesn’t exist.

To take a concrete example of this, A Brush With Love is in told in dual POV between the two protagonists, and I know a lot of readers really love dual POV because, and I quote, “you get both sides of the story”. But it’s actually more complicated than that. Because, unless it’s one of those books that treats reality is objective and there’s literally no on-page differentiation between what one protagonist experiences and what the other perceives, what you’re actually getting is: a story constructed from the fragments of two different people’s POV. That’s not the same as both sides of the story, you know?

Both single POV and dual POV have their own set of challenges for a writer. With single POV, it’s how to make the character whose head we never get into feel as complete and dynamic as the character we spend all our time with. Sometimes it’s even about letting the reader see beyond the limited perspective of the narrator WHILE WE’RE IN THEIR HEAD which is, y’know, bananas if you stop and think about it. With dual POV, though, it’s making decisions about who gets to tell which bit of the story and joining up the edges so the reader doesn’t fall into a pit of unreality between one character’s POV and the next.

In the case of Harper and Dan, we would often find Harper making a decision about the relationship in her own POV chapters (“safer to be friends” for e.g.) and then reversing that decision in Dan’s. I’m not saying it’s wrong, either from a character or narrative perspective, for Harper to change her mind about what she wants, or what she feels able to have (I’d say, in fact, it was pretty authentic to my own subjective experiences of anxiety), nor am I saying that the progression of the romantic arc failed to replicate to my satisfaction the exact rhythms of a relationship involving a neurotypical participant. But, to me, I found I occasionally lacked in-text emotional context for the nuances of Harper’s behaviour because—at key moments of her story, particularly moments that related to significant personal change, growth or revelation—I was witnessing them through Dan’s eyes.

That’s not about the book as a vehicle for ND storytelling or even about Harper’s portrayal as a ND character. It’s about how the book is constructed on a technical basis, and my personal feelings as a reader about how the way the book was constructed impacted my response to text. Of course, structure is inextricable from character and character is inextricable from identity so I'm not claiming that the aspects of the book's structure that made me perceive the relationship progression in a certain way exist in political isolation or as objective truth. But I don't necessarily feel it's a wholly compromised position either.

In terms of the pacing, which I also mentioned in passing in my initial review: my feeling here was that both the personal-growth and romantic arcs of its characters were wrapped up with noticeable rapidity compared to the time spent on the initial connection. Harper ends up in hospital and breaks up with Dan in chapter 32, Dan’s mother decides to sell the dental practice in chapter 33, chapter 34 Harper resolves to talk to Dan, in chapter 35 Dan is leaving and Harper isn’t able to tell him she cares about him, chapter 36 it is now March and Dan is sad in New York, chapter 37 it is now April and Harper is getting health with her mental health, chapter 38 Harper has graduated and admits she misses Dan, chapter 39 Harper rings Dan, chapter 40 they get back together. Then there’s an epilogue. These 9 chapters cover a hell of a LOT of ground and feel, if I’m honest, somewhat utilitarian: it’s like being in the car with someone who is going perilously close to the speed limit to get you where they want you to be, and there is an absolutely no fucking way they are stopping at a service station or even letting you put on some music while they drive. Given the character-focused attention to detail of the previous 31 chapters, the comparative rush to HEA feels a bit unbalanced. I could, of course, be unable to see past my own privilege but my sense is that this is about the shape of the narrative relative to *itself* rather than about the way the book adheres to or diverges from either genre-typical or neurotypical frameworks.

The reason my comment on pacing was little more than a throwaway is because, ironically, I think it’s kind of a genre problem? One I’ve grappled with and continue to grapple with myself: you usually need a moment when the couple fall apart to prove that they’re capable of working through their own bullshit and are serious enough about being together that the love proves stronger than the bullshit, but you also don’t want to keep the couple off-page for too long because, um, I mean couple on-page is why we’re all here? Which means it’s kind of a balancing act where you tend to fall off the beam regardless, either by separating the couple for too long (so it’s frustrating) or not separating them for long enough (so it feels artificial). And maybe there are things to be interrogated here, about how we as readers respond to things like recovery from trauma or mental health management, when they’re also part of romance arc. Or it might just be the end of the book felt a little rushed to me? But it's not something I felt particularly strongly about on this occasion, hence the fact I didn't go super into it. Fixed that now though ;)

*Also I'm saying 'couple' like polyam doesn't exist. Relationship participants.

5/5 ⭐️ thank you very much netgalley! I loved it a lot, it was amazing and it dealt with anxiety really well in my opinion, I loved how the relationship developed, it was honestly amazing and I would definitely reread it, which says a lot about how much I liked it :D

While A Brush with Love may be Mazey Eddings debut novel, it certainly didn't feel like it. This is one of the most real books that I've read in some time.

Harper is a dental student who is awaiting placement for her residency. She's driven, focused and most all of her focus goes towards her studies. She ends up running into Dan, a fellow student, but he isn't quite as enamored with school as she is. His father was a dentist and therefore he's under tremendous pressure to carry on the family legacy.

While it's clear there is an attraction between Harper and Dan, they form a friendship and try to keep things platonic. You can probably guess how that works out, but with the pressures of school, family, life and friends, are they going to be able to make something work? Or will all of those things end their budding relationship before it begins?

Both Harper and Dan go through their own journeys throughout this book and they were well done, in my opinion. I saw a lot of myself in Harper. I suffer from anxiety and so there were many things she was feeling that I've felt myself. I'm very glad I took a chance on this first-time author. It was a wonderful book and I look forward to other offerings in the future!

**I voluntarily read an early copy of this title courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review**