Thank you NetGalley and publisher for this ARC publication for an honest review.

This is book three of a series. This is Indira's story. I loved the childhood backstory of Jude and Indira and how they were "enemies.' The progression between them was natural and fun with all the bickering and the fine line of love was always there beneath the loathing. The mental health issues were a strong part of the storyline, and it was done well. I'm glad Indira wasn't trying to be a psychiatrist with Jude just "his person."

There were so many cute, sweet moments even with all the dark issues and anxieties. I'll admit, however, the steam level was a little too much for me. Some stuff can be left behind a closed door...

Overall, an enjoyable read!

3.5 stars

This book wasn't what I expected. It was a lot to read emotionally. That's not a bad thing. It was just very heavy at times. There were parts that felt s bit dragged and the ending felt a bit rushed and over simplified which was disappointing. I did enjoy the book overall. 3.5-4 stars

📖Book: The Plus One
⭐️Rating: 5/5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
✍🏼Author: Mazey Eddings
📚Genre: Romance
🗏 Pages:307
💕Tropes: Fake Dating, Only One Bed, Best Friends Sister, Childhood Enemies
⚠️Warnings: Mental Illness, Panic Attacks, Trauma
🔖Readability: 4.5/5 italic font is used
🥇First Line: Indira knew, rationally, it wasn't doing her much good to keep canceling her therapy appointments.

Things to expect:
✨Dual POV
❤️Fake Wedding Date
🛏️Only One Tent
💚Mental Health Rep

As always, Mazey Edding ate and left no crumbs. This series and this story are what I love about the romance genre. The entire time you are engaged and want to know what will happen in the end. Mazey's writing style is one I adore, and how she truly and honestly represents mental health is so refreshing. I love everything this author writes, and The Plus One is no different. The story starts with a bang and is a chaotic mess of excellence. The pacing, the spice, the plot, and the writing style make this novel a five-star read. I highly suggest that if you love all things romance, Mazey Eddings goes to the top of your list.

Thanks to St Martin Press for the advanced reader copy. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

I’ve been a huge Mazey Eddings fan since first reading Harper and Dan’s love story in A Brush With Love, and after reading Lizzie Blake’s Best Mistake and adoring that as well, I was ecstatic to get the opportunity to read The Plus One, and *spoiler alert* I loved this third book, too.

As others have said, this book truly is a love letter to self-care and a reminder that addressing mental illness is just as important as getting physical ailments checked out. It’s an airhorn signaling that anyone can be affected by and impacted by mental illness, even doctors. It’s a comforting hug and back rub, whispering, “You’re not alone,’” and “It’s okay to be broken.”

Compared to A Brush With Love and Lizzie Blake, I will say that The Plus One had a heavier and more serious tone. While there was still some fun banter and sarcasm, a lot of this book revolved around both Indira and Jude addressing their mental health issues, both individually and as supports for each other. Jude’s PTSD and anxiety was palpable, which made reading this a more intense and uncomfortable experience for me personally as an empath, but it also served as a good reminder that confronting our feelings and healing means sometimes sitting with those big and tough feelings and settling into that discomfort.

The way Mazey writes anxiety and mental illness is very realistic, and I'm so glad she's using her writing to reach others because I truly believe it helps us know that we're not alone, it's okay to not be okay, and it's a sign of strength, not weakness, to ask for help. Thank you so much for that reminder, Mazey, and for always be such a strong advocate for mental health awareness and the destigmatization of mental illness.

I truly was not prepared for this book. I didn’t expect to love this one as much as I did! From the cool philly references to the fun sibling relationship and everything in between i loved this one! The author did an incredible job balancing the serious aspects that the main characters faced in this storyline while adding in light hearted moments to keep it entertaining. I cannot recommend this read enough to people struggling with a breakup, with a job situation, with depression or really anything out there. This one is just so good


This review has been added to Goodreads, Literal and Storygraph, as well as Barnes & Noble and Amazon. This will be posted to my instagram (@manymerrybooks) within the week.

Thank you for allowing me to read this story!!

4 stars! Thank you NetGalley for this eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Dira and Jude were so cute together and I love that Jude finally found help and Dira was able to support him. Dealing with trauma and PTSD is not easy and it just made Jude and Indira’s characters all that more relatable and lovable!

The mental health representation was great and it made both Dira and Jude so open and vulnerable.

The fake dating was done so well and I love how everything flowed together.

I love how much Dira cared for Jude and how understanding she was. She was amazing as a support system and I really enjoyed how she loved him unconditionally!

To start this off, I would like to say that Mazey has done it again!! I swear to god, her books keep getting better.

Jude and Indira were so cute. I love how open they were to each other once they started fake dating, It was so refreshing to see that, specially Jude because oftentimes, men in books tend to be closed off with their feelings. And I would like to say that the way Mazey wrote Jude's pain and his issues were beautifully done. I could feel what he was feeling. And I loved how open he was to therapy once he and Dira talked to each other.

And Indira was the best. You could feel her anger towards her dad. And the fact that she worked with kids made me love her even more.

And I LOVED that there was no third act breakup hehe and instead talked about their situation.

Thank you Mazey Eddings and St. Martin Press for providing me with an ARC of The Plus One

I really enjoyed A Brush With Love and consider Lizze Blake's Best Mistake an all time romance favorite, so I already had high hopes going into The Plus One. This book has secured Mazey Eddings as an auto buy author for me, and one of my most favorite romance authors. Her ability to write about mental health in a relatable, accessible way is completely unmatched. All of her heroines resonated so much with me and each of their stories was so special.

While Lizzie & Rake remain my favorite couple of the group, Indira and Jude completely captured my heart in this one. Their banter was really top notch and the chemistry between the two of them as their relationship evolved from friendship to romantic love was believable in every way. And the steam? Don't even get me started. Somehow simultaneously scorching hot and achingly tender, Eddings can write a damn good sex scene.

The Plus One is childhood friends to lovers with a side of fake dating and a dollop of forced proximity. There is fantastic PTSD and anxiety rep, discussions of therapy, boundary setting with toxic family members, and the characters supporting one another in making decisions that are the healthiest and best for them. It's also thanks to this book that I'll likely never look at peanut butter the same way again. I loved this one so much and cannot recommend it and the rest of the series enough!

What a lovely story; Mazey has outdone herself with her latest, and all I want to do is live in this little world for longer. Indira (and Lizzie and Harper) have my entire heart.

Child enemies but also brother's best friend excuse me??? This is my favorite of the series so far, but that may also have to do with my love for a fake wedding date story.

I really enjoyed this book more than I do a lot of Rom Coms. I really loved the depths and layers to it. It was funny, it was flirty, and it was vulnerable. It dealt with finding love amongst the other stuff we go through daily, and not only physical but also mental battles. It was just simply beautiful.

In the beginning I was pretty hesitant about moving forward in reading it. I am not always in love with the way characters are written in an "enemies to lovers" style romance. I usually think that one of them is being over-dramatic for no real reason. I started reading a bit defensively, but as I read on, it was a very comfortable read and I liked the actual dynamic of the characters, even their annoyances with each other.

I liked the progression of the relationship throughout the book too. Especially the ending. There are things I don't like in romance books and some that I do, but this felt developed and relevant in a way not every author accomplishes. I enjoyed how the final big conflict was handled. I think a lot of romance writers tend to go in the opposite direction where its a bit redundant, but this one didn't follow one of my least favorite tropes like some of the romance books I have read recently.

This was my first Mazy Eddings book, but this will absolutely not be my last. I thought it was wonderful and well written.

I think this is my favorite book of Mazey Eddings! A fake dating, childhood enemies, brothers best friend, and mental health rep (PTSD, abandonment issues, panic attacks, etc.)?

What I think really made me love this was Mazey made sure to show that love doesn’t heal all. Mental health is so important and everyone has their own journey to walk through. Indira and Jude are struggling and while they’re helping each other heal, they also know they have to do their own work.

I absolutely love Jude and Indira with my whole heart. Go pick up this book ASAP— out now!

4⭐️

I really loved The Plus One and Indira and Jude's friends to lovers story; it had both the basis and foundation for a deep connection, and the spice and chemistry most people look for in a romance!

This story did have a page in the beginning for its trigger warnings, and I want to emphasize that there are many conversations and inner monologues that center around mental health and PTSD struggles. In the authors note, Eddings does say how writing this story was like a release for her own mental health struggles, so I understand why it was essential for the author to include what she did.

While I understand why the book had the heavy plot points it did, I think what could have made this a 5 star romance read for me was if there had been a bit more to the romance plot and relationship building, as that seemed to get overshadowed a lot of times by the mental health plot points.

I also call this story a friends to lovers book, because there was only a sprinkle of fake dating, and a dash of enemies to lovers included. Nevertheless, the tension was still there, and the spicy scenes were multiple and open door!

I did love both of their development. Indira and Jude were so sweet together, and I loved getting to see all of the other characters again as well. They are all likeable, and I was left wondering if we would get to read Thu's story as well!! While I do recommend the series as a whole, you can definitely read this as a standalone if you happen to pick it up.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the eARC in exchange for an honest review!

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for providing the ARC.

I think Mazey Eddings is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors.

I love the way she handles hard topics, in this case PTSD and parental abandonment coupled with adult anxiety. She doesn't shy away from, she doesn't stylize them for the sake of having a happily ever after. She talks about it in a very real, visceral sense and readers gain an acute understanding of how these real life problems would affect a relationship.

Indira and Jude are so wholesome and wonderful. I loved seeing them realize that they were always on this path - Jude keeping tokens and mementos that Indira had given him throughout his life and Indira realizing that she left. It was all beautifully handled and beautifully written. I am almost sad that we didn't get Alex and Thu's story because I would have eaten that one up as well.

I absolutely LOVED this book! Mazey does such a wonderful job writing neurodivergent characters in a real and relatable way. I also loved the way therapy was represented throughout this book. Indira and Jude were great on their own but fit so well together and made for a fantastic couple. I would highly recommend this book to any romance fan.

For Indira in The Plus One by Mazey Eddings, it’s not bad enough that all her friends are all matched up and happily partnered, she also has to take part in her brothers wedding as he marries the cousin of her cheating ex-boyfriend! Add on top of that the return of her brother’s best friend for the wedding festivities, and her nemesis, Jude.

Judy’s been away for the last few years, working on paying off his medical debt as a overseas emergency medical practitioner. Suffering from extreme, PTSD, the wedding, festivities and events are extremely difficult for him… And this new found attraction to his best friends little sister isn’t making things any easier.

Both uncomfortable and out of sorts with all the festivities, Indira and Jude team up for some classic fake dating to make this easier on both of them. Cue the antics and incidences pushing them together to create a real relationship out of the sparks their attraction!

Author Mazey Eddings does a great job, taking a class a trope and breathing new life into it. Her characters are multi facetted and well developed, and they create a real environment for this romance to grow. As a series finale this book at everything, a series reader would want. The characters from the last books are fully involved in the storyline and the final wrapup ties up all the loose ends.

Another great romance, the tackles, tough mental health issues in a respectful and real way. I can’t wait to see what Mazey Eddings will bring us next!

Thanks to St. Martin’s Press for my e-book review copy. Opinions are my own.

#ThePlusOne #MazeyEddings

Indira is dealing with her recent breakup. But she has to be in close proximity to her ex because, plot twist, he's in her brother's wedding. She asks Jude, her brother's best friend, to fake date her for the wedding so she can get through the wedding and breakup without losing her mind. The only catch? She and Jude can't stand each other... they've had a rivalry since they were kids. Queue the tension!

Indira and Jude end up being exactly what each other needs. She's dealing with her breakup, and he's working through serious PTSD and trauma as a result of his job in the medical field working in countries in crisis.

I was full on expecting a cute fake dating romcom with this book. And while we do get those aspects, this book really dives into mental health, PTSD, trauma and therapy. It was a beautiful story. There was laughter and romance, but also many serious conversations and situations that Indira and Jude work through together. I really enjoyed it!

I received an advanced copy of this ebook, but the review is my own.

WOW! I am at a loss for words! This book was extraordinary! I really liked how Mazey Eddings was able to accurately portray PTSD. I really enjoyed Mazey's writing and the characters she created. I thought this book could have been a little shorter. Overall, I thought this was a great book! I highly recommend the book to all the romance lovers! This Thank you so much NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the opportunity to read this as an ARC!

This third book in the A Brush With Love series was nearly impossible to put down!! I loved it.

Synopsis: After walking in on her boyfriend with another woman, Indira decides to crash with her brother Collin and his fiancé (who are deep into wedding planning). Also crashing with her brother is his best friend and Indira’s childhood nemesis, Jude.

Jude’s job as a doctor with a humanitarian aid organization has impacted his mental health, and he’s struggling to adjust to being back home. Meanwhile, Indira and Jude’s forced proximity and emotional turmoil have them seeing each other in a new light.

My thoughts: Eddings wrote a truly beautiful book that captures all the feels! I really loved this story.

Indira and Jude had the best banter and steam, and the arc to their relationship truly was a journey. I loved the openness and supportiveness between them, but also loved that they, as individuals, had their own personal arcs as well.

It’s so SO funny and endearing, while still going deep. With Jude’s journey especially, this book makes such a strong statement about the importance of mental health. And, I loved seeing how this couple really work together toward their HEA.

Thank you so much for an advanced copy of this book!

I enjoyed this one so much. It was cute, fun, flirty, and it gave me all the vibes I wanted from a romance book! I enjoyed the characters, and I was really invested in the outcome. Overall, this was a really nice spring romance!

I also really like the way Mazey Eddings writes. Her tone, her prose, and her style all hit every button for me! The only thing that kept this from being a five star romance was it didn't really have anything that truly wowed or surprised me. That ISN"T to say the book is not wonderful - because it is! It's just a bit predictable.

Otherwise, this was a great read and I'll be buying a copy for my shelves!

Star rating: 4⭐️