Mazey Eddings does it again! I love the way Eddings represents anxiety and mental disorders. Her characters are always so raw and real, and their problems always feel real. Jude and Indira's relationship was real. I adore the way Eddings writes.

I absolutely love this author and I LOVE this series. One of my favorite books last year was Lizze Blake's Best Mistake, so it's no surprise that I also loved her newest one!! This book was so cute, and funny too, but with plenty of deep and truly meaningful moments. I really love and appreciate the way the author handles different areas of mental health throughout the book, and the positivity/support surrounding therapy and medication! Jude and Indira's story was sweet and absolutely beautiful in the way they understood each other and healed each other heal. I highly recommend this book!

This was a solid enemies to lovers, fake dating book. I enjoyed it. It’s a good romance and was fun.

In this enemies to lovers, fake dating open door romance, The Plus One follows Indira and Jude as the navigate a wedding after both of their lives have imploded. Jude has been Indira nemesis since childhood, but the two are all grown up and with some forced proximity, the pair find themselves feeling feelings that they never thought was possible with each other.

What a wonderful ending to this series! I have thoroughly enjoyed being immersed in this world with Harper, Lizzie, and Indira. I absolutely loved the epilogue; it was the perfect ending to the series and made my heart so happy. It showed the friend group in the most perfect places years after the books end.

“Healing isn’t linear.”

The Plus One is definitely the heaviest of the books, but all themes are handled with care. I appreciated the author's note and how up front Mazey is with what readers are going to encounter. I also loved that the hero was the character trying to figure out their lives, while the heroine is the one helping him through his issues, which was a nice change of pace, especially in romance.However, my favorite piece of the book was the positive portrayal of therapy. Therapy is championed throughout the book, instead of showing it as something taboo, which made me incredibly happy. For me, the book was a tad heavier and emotional than I needed at the moment, but that was more a reflection of my current mental state, rather than the author's written craft.

Mazey Eddings is officially an auto-buy author for me. Even when I thought I wouldn't end up liking her work, I end up LOVING it. Her writing is just so raw but relatable, cackling funny and sobbing emotional. Her characters are ones you want to be friends with in real life. They face challenges we all are familiar with and how they handle their issues is so well done. I do think this book is my favourite of the series, but I can absolutely confidently say Jude is my favourite book boyfriend of all three!

The Plus One takes on two of my favourite tropes - childhood friends/enemies to lovers/best friends brother and it does NOT LET YOU DOWN in the steam department! But there's just SO much more to the relationship between our two main characters in this one. It's a romance novel with so much substance and oopmh, you know?

4.5⭐️

<b> A Haiku about Jude Bailey
By: Indira Papadakis

Jude. Rude. Fucking screwed
Socially, he sucks asshole
Personally, gross</b>

Indira’s relationship with her boyfriend, Chris, comes to a sudden and abrupt end when she walks in on him with another woman. She decides to crash at her brother’s home for the foreseeable future since she’ll be spending a lot of time with him anyway leading up to his wedding. To make matters worse, she immediately finds herself face to face with her nemesis and brother’s best friend: Jude. Indira and Jude have been enemies their whole lives, and Jude is staying with Collin and his fiancé, Jeremy, and taking an extended break from his work with the Global Health Care Organization for their wedding. Indira and Jude are forced to deal with the stress of their lives while simultaneously learning to tolerate being around each other.

The perfect read for Mental Health Awareness Month! I love that Mazey Eddings incorporates mental health into her books in a way that feels authentic, relatable, and funny while still maintaining empathy for the characters. Her characters still find love despite their mental health struggles, and learn to love themselves for who they are. I wasn’t 100% on board with Indira and Jude at the start (because Lizzie and Rake are *chef’s kiss* and I did not think it could get any better than them), but by the end of this I have totally changed my mind. I love them so much and I love the raw moments they have together and how sweet their relationship becomes. The only thing I didn’t love was that the fake dating aspect felt a little pointless since all of the important people except Indira’s ex knew it was fake. Overall, this was a super cute and sexy romcom! I have really enjoyed this series and I am sad that it’s over, but I can’t wait to see what Mazey does next!!

<b>” You can hurt and also be loved. You can feel sadness and also laugh and feel joy. Good emotions can coexist with hard ones.”</b>

Words cannot express how much I LOVED this book. Mazey Eddings creates characters who are full of depth and whom you can't help but root for. I absolutely adored the fact that Indira and Jude chose to heal together rather than letting their issues drive them apart. Additionally, beautiful mental health rep!

I loved Lizzie Blake and I was really excited for another book set in the same world, and I mostly enjoyed it but for some reason a lot of little things bugged me the whole way through and I guess ultimately Indira didn't feel authentic to me.

Steamy, intense, and really romantic fun all around! I think Mazey's on a roll with her books and I can't wait for more from her work.

This series is incredible! Lizzie will be my fave, but I loved this one all the same. Will be buying and recommending to EVERYONE!

This was a fun brother's best friend mixed with enemies to lovers romance. When Indira catches her ex in bed with another woman, she escapes to her brother's house only to find that Jude, her brother's best friend and her childhood nemesis, is already there in preparation for her brother's wedding. As much as she can't stand Jude, she realizes that something is wrong with and this triggers them to realize that love and hate are much closer than they seem. As much as it was light, airy and fun, it was also an interesting take on PTSD and how this affects people's relationships.

"The Plus One" is another hit from Mazey Eddings' "A Brush with Love" series, and can easily be read as a stand-alone novel (though it does share a core group of characters from the other books in this series). "The Plus One" focuses on child psychiatrist Indira, who has recently moved in with her brother Collin and and his fiancee Jeremy, in the weeks leading up to their wedding, after walking in on her boyfriend Chris, in a compromising position with another woman, in their apartment. After arriving at her brother's home, she discovers his best friend Jude is also staying there for the wedding, on leave from his position as a surgeon with a group that provides medical-care in war-torn and disaster-related areas. Jude happens to be Indira's childhood nemesis, but their relationship soon turns from animosity to something more as they-agree to fake-date, and have Jude be Indira's plus-one to Collin and Jeremy's wedding knowing that Chris and his new girlfriend would be there.

"The Plus One" is easily my favorite book of the three so far in the series. I simply loved seeing the development of Indira and Jude's relationship throughout the story Mazey Eddings does a great job in combining humorous moments between the characters, as well as addressing serious topics, such as PTSD, abandonment issues, anxiety, depression, and the importance of taking care of one's mental health and therapy, within the storyline. "The Plus One" was a quick, and enjoyable, read, and I look forward to more from this author.

Thanks to Net Galley and St. Martin's Press/St. Martin's Griffin for providing me with an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

💐The Plus One 💐

“I want you to feel, Jude. Feel everything and do it with abandon. Because no matter what you feel, what rises up from all of that, you will always have a safe space in my heart. I will always, always be here, loving you through it all.”

Oh my heart. Indira and Jude’s story was beautiful and I wish I could read it again for the first time. Brought together for events leading up to her brother’s wedding, Indira forms an unlikely truce with her childhood nemesis and brother’s best friend. In order to escape her cheating ex and for Jude to have a barrier to the overwhelm of the wedding events, they decide to pretend to date - being each other’s plus one. As the wedding gets closer, their relationship turns real and the looming deadline of Jude’s return to crisis zones as an emergency surgeon hangs over them. Through it all, they grow together and their love story is a beautiful one.

Check this one out if you’re looking for:
💐 Enemies to lovers
💐 Fake dating
💐 Forced proximity
💐 Mental health representation, including MC with PTSD

Overall, I enjoyed this story but it didn't replace some of my favorite romance novels on the market currently.

I didn't realize it was going to be heavy on mental health content so I was a little caught off guard. (Not to say that covering mental health topics in a book is in any way a bad thing.) But usually I pick these novels to give me a reprieve from heavy topics and something to read that's light and easy.

I was also a little reluctant to believe the drastic "child enemies" storyline since they are both well-educated adults and didn't necessarily need to bring their childhood differences into their adult relationship in the beginning of the book.

In conclusion, I think this book does a good job of highlighting effects of trauma and aspects of mental health. I wasn't really in awe of the book though and don't think I would recommend it.

AH such a beautiful story of mental health and how to worth WITH people in a romantic relationship, because it’s DOABLE and being mentally ill doesn’t stop you from finding true love 🥹

i think this is her best yet i was on the fence about her first two novels but this one truly takes the cake

4 Strong Hate To More Stars
Oh, the way we always have those types of enemy/friend relationships. We have a woman who thinks everything is perfect in her life with a job she loves and a man who loves her...only to find out he is a cheater. Now she has to go to a wedding that of course involves a couple that will have invited her and her ex.

While our gal is at this wedding weekend, it turns out the one person she has always had a serious problem with is there as well. He has returned from being all over the world helping others who live in all sorts of conditions. He hasn't been around the type of people who are here at the wedding, flaunting vast wealth. The shock of how these people live compared to all of the others he has been helping is difficult to handle.

The only way for these two to deal with the situation presented is to join forces and pretend they are a couple and just be united against them all.

Cute with a strong dose of a serious look and mental health and care.

This book was a good read, the themes were a bit of a surprise but a good one. Mental health used to be a hush hush subject, but the author let us inside the character's head to feel and understand them. I appreciated how these were addressed within the book. The plot was a little drawn out with some extra unneeded bits. I'm happy the characters could find comfort in each other, and the I found them to be a complementary match for each, which cannot be said for all books. Overall, I wouldn't consider this a fluffy read, but I would recommend reading it.

Thank you, NetGalley and the Publisher for the eARC! The Plus One is a cute romance book about childhood frenemies turning into lovers.
The Plus One is an easy read with some laugh out loud moments. It also touches on the importance of mental health. I could see a sequel coming with these characters and it would certainly be added to my to read list!

“The Plus One” is an excellent story of childhood enemies forced to connect and support each other as they navigate PTSD, abandonment, and the trials of being human.

This book was absolutely fantastic. And I’ll tell you why. Although these characters are flawed and prone to the typical miscommunication trope or the “let’s keep this a secret from everyone we love, because that makes perfect sense,” they don’t fall privy to it. They work and work and work some more. It was realistic and a good representation of what love looks like.

To start, I loved the second book in this series, Lizzie Blake’s Best Mistake. That book was my first taste at mental health representation in fiction books. The Plus One is another installment of the same series, featuring main characters that were in the background of the first two books of this series. All the friends are tied in, but this book focuses on different mental health issues, mostly PTSD and anxiety.
Both MC’s in this book are doctors dealing with mental health issues. The FMC is a child psychiatrist who spends her days helping others with their problems. The MMC is an ER physician who works across the world responding to areas of disaster, while suffering from PTSD related to this. Indira and Jude have known each other since childhood, as Jude is best friends with Indira’s older brother. (A favourite trope of mine!)
Mazey Edding’s writing is educational, while being humourous and sweet. Jude and Indira are complex, lovable characters who have great growth and character development through the book. This book has ALL of the tropes- (fake dating, brothers best friend, enemies to lovers, slow burn) but still doesn’t seem to overdo it and is very believable. I usually don’t have the patience for a slow burn, but their relationship was EVERYTHING and I was obsessed. They are so good together, and the way they supported each other through their struggles, while still having amazing chemistry from the beginning, melted me. It will take my heart awhile to recover from the Bob’s Burgers Scene. (If you know, you know!)
Thank you to Netgalley and St. Martins Press for the e-ARC of this lovely book.