After reading Love Scenes by Bridget Morrissey, I knew I would be on the lookout for her next book to come out. A Thousand Miles did not disappoint.

Dee Matthews is co-host of the wildly popular podcast “ Did I Forget to Tell You” based out of Chicago. Ben Porter is a 7th grade teacher in Indiana, complacently living his life.

It’s been 10 years since Dee Matthews saw or spoke to Ben Porter. But it was like a scene from a movie, Ben shows up in Chicago, soaked from the rain, and knocks on Dee’s door. They made a promise 10 years ago, to take the same road trip to Colorado. All of Dee’s memories and feelings that she thought she had successfully forgotten, come rushing back. But then she remembers and the anger and hurt bubble back up to the surface. “A promise is a promise” And just like that, it’s like nothing changed in their 10 years and yet everything has.

As they begin their journey, it’s all the small nuances that you remember about someone, especially one that was your best friend. And it’s dangerous territory, remembering things as they were. People grow and change, and Ben has had to major life changes that is forcing him to re-evaluate his life – hence the road trip. We watch as the drive cross country and become closer and closer… but the hurtful question remains – why did he just leave Dee behind?

What an emotional journey as they traverse the whole gamut of emotions. We watch as they become closer and closer… would it be hurtful to cross that line again, knowing this time that it wouldn’t be permanent like you had hoped at 18? Strap in for a bumpy ride. And I won’t lie, I squealed a tiny bit when I read an Easter egg. I absolutely loved this book and recommend it.

Thank you to Netgalley and Berkley Pub for the opportunity to read and review this book.

Dee has a successful podcast with her partner, Javi. Their show is all about people telling their crazy stories and their secrets. One secret that Dee has kept close to her heart was her relationship with Ben. They were best friends in high school but ten years ago, when they were about to graduate from high school, they crossed a line that they could never recover from. They haven't seen or heard from each other since and when Ben shows up on Dee's doorstep one night, she is surprised but not surprised at the same time. They made a promise ten years ago to take a road trip to Ben's grandma's house, and he intends to keep that promise. Dee doesn't have any reason to say no so they set off on their trip. Will their hearts survive the time they will have to spend together driving those thousand miles?

I loved Dee and Ben! They were awesome characters and Bridget Morrissey did a fantastic job of breathing life into them and also showing their natural chemistry. Dee was hilarious, silly, dramatic, crude, and she was impressively strong willed. Ben was sincere, open, kind, thoughtful and giving. He had a great sense of humor that was a bit more subtle than Dee's but he was able to go toe-to-toe with her in their crazy conversations. Their dialogue and silly antics had me scratching my head but laughing out loud at the same time. I can easily say that they're one of the most awesomely weird couples that I come across!

Ben was on a journey to finding an anchor for himself, and he was hoping Dee would be that anchor. He recently received difficult news and he was feeling untethered. This road trip and reconnection with Dee was what he needed to launch him onto a path of going after what he wanted. That journey was difficult but beautiful.

This is the second book I've read by Bridget Morrissey and I am looking forward to reading more of her work. Pick up this book for a cute, funny, and sweet friends-to-lovers/second-chance/unrequited love romance!

Steam level: 🔥🔥½
⚠️: mention of death of a loved one, mention of infidelity (not between the main characters)

A Thousand Miles is a friends to lovers road trip with a 10 year time gap/jump!

Let it be known that friends to lovers is one of my favorite tropes. I was talking with a friend about how special it is when two people know each other so well but start to discover one another in new ways!

Dee is a podcaster. She essentially has made a name for herself by revealing too much about her life and talks about controversial and spicy topics. Ben is the one who left. One day is shows up at her door…10 years after a mystery blow up and convinces her to take a road trip…one they had promised each other in the past they would take.

I thought this book was highly readable. It’s one you can get through in a few days and has a lot of sweet moments. I appreciated the connection and the little moments of humor between Ben and Dee.

What was hard for me was that Dee is a little crass for shock value at times, I thought she was harder to relate to and there were a few times her humor was lost on me. I also did myself a disservice by reading this In tandem with People We Meet on Vacation…which I am absolutely adoring everything about so in retrospect I wish I would have spread these reads apart!

Read if you like…

- childhood friends to lovers
- nostalgic road trips
- inside joke banter
- a pesky cat
- diverse 🏳️‍🌈 side characters
- a notch down from open door steam
- public declarations of love
- astrology

I loved Bridget Morrissey's Love Scenes, so I was super excited about this one. She is a fantastic writer. Her prose are witty and fun. I enjoy her humor. I enjoyed the book overall, but I didn't ever fall in love with the main characters.

I ABSOLUTELY LOVED this book! This story quickly made its way into my heart and I can with certainty say I’ll be pressing it on everyone I know when it releases!

Things I loved:
-the sweetest childhood friends to lovers story!
-the 10 year gap of no contact adding a sense of distance to the closeness the characters feel!
-the humor! I laugh out loud so many times!
-the characters, Dee and Ben are people you want to root for! I adore them!
-Abe the Cat.
-the podcast episodes sprinkled in giving us character depth as well as insight without it feeling forced!
-the maturity of the characters! There was definitely character growth from the beginning of the book to the end, but i really loved that Dee and Ben were older, had been in therapy, and both knew how to communicate! This made the trials that popped up in their relationship that much better!
-the steam level! This was door cracked just barely open and felt perfect for this story! Just enough you know what’s happening, but not so much I’ll feel weird lending this one to my mother! 😂

All in all I loved this! An easy 5⭐️ from me!

I had no idea what I was in for with this book but holy smokes it was fantastic. Dee and Ben are funny and snarky and feel like the kind of friends who get each other and fall back into step after a decade apart. I loved the writing the settings and everything about this book. Complete perfection!

Dee and Ben were childhood best friends, and one time lovers who had a falling out their Senior Year of HS. Fast forward ten years, and the two haven’t seen or spoken to each other since. Now they’re coming back together to fulfill a long ago promise and take a road-trip together.

The premise behind this read intrigued me - a road-trip between former bffs, second chance romance, and Dee being a podcaster? All seemed really interesting. Having read Morrissey’s Love Scenes I knew she had a knack for delivering interesting characters.

This one was okay for me, but was not quite what I expected having read her prior year release. To be fair, friends to lovers and road-trip are not my go to tropes and I can be pretty picky about them as a result.

I enjoyed Ben as a character more than Dee - I found her harder to like or relate to. Ben, although not perfect, still felt more real and likable to me. Parts I enjoyed were the podcast segments woven in, Abe as a side character, and the resolution was satisfying. I wish we had gotten more detailed closure around what took place 10 years ago. I also wish the pacing was a bit differently in the middle, as it dragged a bit there for me.

I would try more by this author and look forward to reading more by her in the future. Thank you to NetGalley and Berkeley Romance for the opportunity to read an early copy in exchange for an honest offering of my thoughts and opinions.

Dee's experience cohosting the very popular podcast Did I Forget To Tell You? has made her bare her past in all its highs and lows, right to her listeners. While she's used to rehashing what she's been through, or interviewing others on what they have been through, there is but one thing that she's held off on talking about as honestly as she's grown accustomed to. She'll talk about trainwreck dates, pickup lines, bad sex experiences but talking about her former best friend, Ben? Not allowed. Ben isn't someone she's used to sharing like this and when she slips up in one episode, he is the first and only name on the show to ever be redacted.

In a surprising turn of events, Ben is on her doorstep. Unannounced. A promise is a promise and suddenly the two have to see if all those years of separation will make this somewhat spontaneous road trip to an old time capsule awkward and tense... or if they can fall back to where they left off last.

Ben's going through it dude. After losing his grandma, he learns about a piece of his life he never thought he'd be faced with and he has to come to terms with it. He doesn't know how to talk to his family and he's not sure he wants to right now. Digging up this time capsule and having Dee back by his side may just be exactly what he needs to get him through what's going on in his head. The longer they're together, the better it feels... but there is a lot that needs to be addressed. It doesn't help that the last trip they took a nosedive but this might be the full circle moment they'll need to heal what has been broken.

WELLLLLL WELL WELL!!!

Dude, I loved it. I adored it even. I loved the cover, loved the concept and NOW I love the book. I love a best friend romance but I love it even more when it's a second chance romance TOOOOO. It's so magical. I >:)

Dee and Ben were such an entertaining pair. I loved how quickly they fell back into their old habits but it made me anxious for the eventual confronting of their past. I wanted them to be better and fall back into things and I thought the way they eased into it was very well paced and just well DONE. I also really liked the intimacy of just following the two of them through the whole book. We have a couple of appearances but for the most part... this is Dee and Ben's road to fixing their relationship and we're just the quiet observers.

I also just love how their growth over the years was noted throughout. They had become such mature versions of their past selves and I think that Bridget highlights this really well. She makes it enjoyable and I'm thrilled it didn't turn into them competing over who was in a better place in their life than the other.

OVERALL I LOVED. I REALLY DID.

Think People We Meet On Vacation meets Love & Other Words with a ton of drama and a podcast! This was such a cute book and I enjoyed it from start to finish. The characters were well written and had flaws which I think made it just so much better. Dee and Ben are a little bit toxic but thats ok! it made it all the more entertaining.

I loved the writing style, it was super easy to read and the podcast chapters were wonderful. Overall this was an awesome book to just chill with while studying for tests and doing schoolwork. I exclusively read this on the bus to and from school and it gave just the best vibes.

I love a friends-to-lovers romance and when you throw in a road trip and second chances you get THIS perfect read! I devoured this one and read it in one sitting because I loved it so much! I'm so excited to read more by the author based on this one.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. DNF. Not for me. The pacing of A Thousand Miles is crazy to me. Recommended for fans Bad Luck Bridesmaid or The Road Trip or for readers who enjoy romance with characters who are kind of a-holes.

Lots of drama fills this road trip tale about estranged lovers who made a promise ten years ago to retrace their epic travels from Illinois to to a decade after the first trip. Ben unexpectedly calls in this favor when his beloved Gam dies and her house needs clearing out. With some degree of shock–perhaps because of how quickly they fall into their old, familiar banter–Dee agrees to make the journey, since her hiatus lines up with teacher Ben’s summer break. Plus, there’s the matter of the Time Capsule they buried in Ben’s grandmother’s backyard…

Told in alternating voices, the narrative included occasional text exchanges and podcast scripts. The road trip includes obligatory planning the route (and side trips) in a greasy spoon, choosing snacks, and road trip games, including the License Plate game and the classic Truth or Dare that gives the characters space to unload some baggage and relive old memorials, while the ceremonial “recreating the previous road trip” activities they pursue, like bowling, allow them to get closer physically and emotionally.

Morrissey uses classic tropes to her advantage: there’s Hurt/Comfort when Dee gets ill, Forced Proximity in shared hotel rooms, and Only One Bed. After a few kisses and more than 500 miles, brash Dee finally gets up the nerve to ask what went wrong between them, and they resolve their relationship.

Now a podcaster, Ben is often referenced as Name Redacted on her podcast, Did I Forget to Tell You? The wondering why they haven’t talked in ten years while Dee still rewatches the old YouTube videos they made together in high school is an intriguing pull through an otherwise straightforward nostalgic plot. This is a must-read for fans of second-chance romance, and anyone who sometimes lives in their heads, wondering about The One That Got Away.

I received an advance reader’s review copy of #AThousandMiles via #NetGalley.

I requested this quite randomly because of the synopsis: two childhood best friends who hooked up at the end of high school and haven't spoken in the ten years since after their friendship fell apart embark on a road trip they promised to do 10 years after doing it the first time. I really liked the characters of Dee and Ben, loved that we got both of their POVs, and thought that their journey together to heal their rift, catch up, and figure out how they are meant to be in each other's lives was well paced and entertaining. Dee has a podcast and Ben is a teacher, and together they randomly rescue a stray cat, whom they layer sneak into a baseball game. It's an adventure and a love story that has some strong personal growth moments for both characters. I am now going to look for Morrissey's backlist, as I'm pretty sure a side character mentioned in this book is the MC of that one! Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC! The book will be released on June 21/22.

I really enjoyed this one! It was so cute, I couldn't help smiling throughout the whole thing. One of my favorite tropes is Second chance romance and A Thousand Miles did not disappoint! Dee and Ben are literally my favorites. Would definitely recommend to others!

Thank you NetGalley for the e-ARC!

This was a fun book. I love road trips etc. However while 2/3 of the book were super entertaining, the last third fell flat for me. This is a second chance romance, with a bout a decade since the couple had seen each other last. But while they keep referencing "10 years ago" and this moment that led them to no longer talk, we never figure out what it exactly was that happened! This was a little frustrating as a reader. But I did enjoy the antics and the connection that the two had. I will for sure read more of this author, as her writing was sound, but the plot development was flat.

This was a great romance journey of a book. The writing was medium paced and felt like a road trip reading it. The author created instant chemistry between the two characters, both through attraction, humor and the unraveling of their past. The main character, Dee, is a podcast host and between each chapter are parts of her podcast that foreshadow events to come and help explain more of her thought process and feelings. Bridget is a talented writer and this will be a hit in romance sections of libraries.

What a fabulous book, filled with humor and heart. Dee is a podcast host and hasn’t seen her best friend Ben since he broke her heart ten years ago. The story unfolds through a road trip they promised to take ten years later. As you read, you find out what happened in their past and how undeniable their chemistry still is. I really enjoyed the short excerpts from Dee’s podcast between the chapters that helped tell the story. I really liked how well I was able to get to know the characters and how much they grew.

😍loved || 💋some stream
🤟second chance, self-growth, a cat at a baseball game
📚The Road Trip, A Cross-Country Christmas
🎶Somewhere In My Car by Keith Urban

To say that I am obsessed with A Thousand Miles by Bridget Morrissey is an understatement. This cute romance follows Ben and Dee, two high school best friends, who reconnect after ten years of silence to go on a promised road trip. Dee is a well-known podcaster that has alluded to the likes of Ben for years under the codename Name Redacted, and Ben is a middle school science teacher with delicious curls and a quick wit.

What can go wrong when you put these two people with harbored feelings, sexual tension, and terrible communication in a small, confined space? Everything, but maybe that’s exactly what they need to move on from their messy past.

Thank you, Net Galley and Berkley Publishing Group for the ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.

There was not one single moment of this book where I did not feel utterly exposed. I was hooked in the first line and it did not let up until the the last. The conflict between Dee and Ben felt completely earned and not at all a “miscommunication” or a “misunderstanding” but the exact type of conflict and real hurt that would after ten years of silence. The banter and way of slipping into old friendships felt effortless in a way that only can exist between old friends. These characters both grew and changed over the years and had to learn if these new versions of themselves could make space for each other. Bridget Morriessy has said this book was hard to write because it is so personal - I found that the vulnerability comes through beautifully.

Well: road trip, estranged high school sweethearts, friends to lovers, second chances themes blended with extra entertaining podcast texts! I’m sold! I think I loved this book more than I expected even though I had hard time to get into the story and connect with characters at first chapters!

Let me make introductions to the characters:

Dee Matthews: 28, quick witted, straightforward, an adventurous Sagittarius woman, is co-host of “Did I forget to tell you” podcast with her friend Javi to share their ugly truths about themselves and help the audiences to be brave enough to come out clean.

Dee shared her problematic relationship with her mother, her money problems, her struggles to find her place in the world. Only thing she couldn’t truly come clean is true identity of “Name Redacted” who is her high school best friend and first love Benjamin Potter she hasn’t talked for 10 years.

And at the same day she breaks up with the mean guy she’s dating, a few seconds later somebody knocks her door. Yes: that somebody is name redacted Ben Potter: her Ben, her best friend who broke her heart and she never get over with. She’s promised to take a road trip ten years before from Illinois to Colorado. And Ben asks him to join her as if he hasn’t ghosted her for ten freaking years!

Dee cannot say no because they both promised to take this trip to Ben’s grandma and now she’s dead. And she cannot let Ben get away from her so easy after ten years of silence.

Ben; caring, sweet and also insecure guy who always chooses safe way which make him lost and unfulfilled. ( as a libra; he’s friendly, genuine, people pleaser who enjoys harmony and peace) After hearing his grandma’s big confession, he gets startled and rethinks the choices he’s made in the past. Now he’s so adamant to win Dee’s trust because he wants her in his life. But both of them’s bottled up feelings: resentments, unresolved issues are about to burst out during their journey!

I think I loved both Dee and Ben’s evolving, learning from their mistakes, confronting with their past mistakes but mostly I adored the podcast parts of the book: they were AMAZING, HONEST, SMART, GENUINE, ENTERTAINING. ( good to see Sloane Ford from Love Scenes made a cameo)

I added additional half stars and rounded up my 4.5 stars to 5 wow I loved this self growth, high chemistry, second chances story so much stars!

Special thanks to NetGalley and Berkley Publishing for sharing this amazing digital reviewer copy with me in exchange my honest thoughts.