Julie Tieu is a brilliant author, but I'm just not connecting with this book. There are a lot of moving parts, and the main character has a negative attitude for reasons I don't understand. I think I could handle one or the other of those things, but both of them together are too much for me. DNF at 21%.

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC.

I enjoyed Circling Back to You and Fancy Meeting You Here just might be my new favorite. First of all, if I had a nickel for every romance book I read about florists, I'd have two nickels...But this one was fabulous. I love a good meet cute and could instantly relate to Elise. To the ways she pushes herself and tries to always be accommodating, to be the best, and how she didn't let anyone in to see her struggle. She's convinced she can do everything on her own without asking for help - talk about a bit too on the nose!

Read if you like:
💍 Multiple Weddings
🔥 Slow-ish burn to 60 (1st kiss around 50%)
🛌 One Bed Trope
💋 Best Friends Brother
💐 Florist FMC
🌏 Diverse Characters
👯‍♀️ Friend Groups

Overall, this one focuses a lot on the weddings of Elise’s three closest friends as they all get married in rapid succession where she is the florist and a bridesmaid at each of the three weddings. This was a bit bothersome to me as she was also doing the florist work super discounted for them but her business was failing to the point she had to let all of her team go and was on the verge of losing her studio for her business.

I also felt like things went a bit from 0 to 100 all of a sudden with her and Ben to the point I wasn’t feeling the chemistry between them at all and wasn’t really invested in their love story.

The third act break-up was also super predictable with the way the book was set up.

This pains me to say, especially after loving the 2022 release from this author but this is not one that knocked it out of the park for me and was more of an okay romance for me personally.

Thanks so much to the publisher for my ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I love the fmc Elise - she is the star of this romance! She is the kind of friend we all want to have, however her friend group took advantage of her time and time again. She had so much pressure on her to be the florist for 3 weddings and be a bridesmaid at the same weddings! Whew! Her florist business was in trouble, the mmc, Ben, was into her but not as supportive as I’d have liked. He’s her bff’s brother and works on his mom’s political campaign- for now. The romance took a back seat to Elise, her goals, and female friendship, which was just fine because Elise was so relatable. There was a ton going on in this book, so if you like an action packed plot, wedding drama, and found-family side characters you will love this one!

Thanks so much to the publisher and NetGalley for the eARC to read and review. All opinions are my own.

This felt like it would make a great made-for-tv movie adaptation as a silly goofy romcom. This is a best friend's brother trope, so Elise, our main character, falls for her friend's brother Ben! Elise is helping to plan her bff's wedding, and this puts her into a bit of a forced proximity situation with Ben. I do wish there was a bit more development of their romance, and less telling.

However, overall, the book was entertaining enough, and felt exactly as chaotic as wedding planning can be sometimes. I would read Julie Tieu's work again in the future!

Fancy Meeting You Here by Julie Tieu is an exquisite literary masterpiece brimming with laughter, heartfelt moments, relatable characters, and an abundance of longing.

Elise Ngo is an up and coming wedding florist who also happens to be a bridesmaid in each of her three best friends’ upcoming weddings. Elise enlists the caterer for help at one of the high profile events, only to find out later that the caterer is the bride’s enigmatic younger brother Ben Yu. After getting off on the wrong foot, Ben decides to contract Elise for floral design for campaign events for his mother’s upcoming re-election. Political complications threaten to undermine their blossoming romance before it really has a chance.

This was a cute and fun romance that also very heavily delved into female friendship and what it means to be a good friend. I loved Elise and all of her friends, especially Beth who really saw and appreciated Elise. Elise’s romance with Ben often took a backseat to her friendships as she navigated her way through running her business and all of their weddings, and I would’ve liked a bit more of Ben overall. What we got was really good (minus the breakup where he was not my fave) but I would’ve liked more!


Recommended if you enjoy:
🤞best friend’s brother
💐 wedding florist and caterer
👎 bad first impressions
👗 27 Dresses (especially the stuck in a storm part)
👰🏽 always the bridesmaid (& florist) never the bride
🗳️ political campaign drama
🎲wild Las Vegas bachelorettes
🍜 delicious food references

Thank you to Netgalley and Avon Books for the advanced copy to read and review. All opinions are my own.

What do you get if you pair the most awkward meet cute with a wedding and political machinations?

The most adorable grumpy sunshine pair of the year, of course.

I can't help but adore Elise. She's under so much pressure but manages to be the perfect character.

And Ben. Oh my. Definitely worth all the complications.

"We were supposed to meet earlier. Before the wedding got in the way."
"Remind me why you like weddings again."

Elise, Rebecca, Jesse, and Beth have been friends since college and now all of them except Elise are getting married within months. Elise has a florist studio that she struggling to keep afloat but agrees to provide the flowers and be a bridesmaid in all the weddings. It is a lot but she is determined to make it work even as all of her friends seem to be moving forward without her. Enter Ben Yu, Rebecca's grumpy brother, who Elise keeps getting paired with.

This is so good! It draws you in, you feel like you are talking to friends (I want to be friends with them), and you are invested in the outcome. A story of good friends finding a way to live their lives, find their happily ever afters, and stay close.

I'd been wanting to read Julie Tieu's books for a long time, because they sound so cute! And I've also been really in the mood for wedding-themed romances. So this should have been a win for me, but unfortunately, it ended up not being my thing at all.

It's hard to explain what I didn't like about it, because it was really just the vibe I got from the characters. I didn't like any of them, and I felt like we wouldn't get along at all in real life because we'd misunderstand each other on a fundamental level. Which is sometimes just the dynamic you have with people, and it's not fun to read about them in that case.

I wanted to DNF very early on, but I ended up giving it a second chance and then DNFing it at 34%. I could tell by then that it was not going to be for me.

This was so so damn cute. I love my romance with lots of angst but this was heartwarming so it didn't need it. It very like a hallmark movie which I LOVE.

This book was a slow burn romance. I ended up having to give up on this one about the halfway point. I just didn’t like the characters. I found the main character so annoying! She is trying to run her own business, and is struggling, but yet she doesn’t seem to be willing to put in effort to make it better. I hated the friendships in this book as well. I care deeply about my friends, and these all seemed so superficial and out of touch.

I was really looking for a fun and light romance but this one just wasn’t for me. I would read something else by this author and wish this book all the success.

Thank you to the publisher and netgalley for granting me access to this e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you to Netgalley and the Publishers for this Advanced Readers Copy of Fancy Meeting You Here by Julie Tieu!

This is a cute romance about Elise, a florist who is always a bridesmaid but never the bride and the handsome caterer (who happens to be her friend's brother) she meets at her best friend's wedding. She's done the flowers for one friend, and now her other two. Conflict and romance ensues. I loved the friend dynamic, though I feel like her friends were each given one personality trait (the smart one, the athletic one, etc.). There is great detail surrounding food and how it smells/tastes, made me hungry! I also liked the brief mentions of cultural traditions with the families. I didn't grow up in an Asian family (I am Asian) so it made me, in a way, mourn the fact that I don't get to have a traditional Chinese wedding. There were also references to Asian culture and American pop culture. Writing wise, it's good for contemporary romance. I keep trying contemporary romance, but maybe it's not for me. This book, like many others, has idk how to word this in another way but, straight humor. Personally, I find a lot of western wedding traditions like the garter and bouquet toss outdated. I did like the one bed trope. I wished they had leaned into it a little more. It was occasionally spicy but not like an erotica.

My biggest complaint was that a true friend wouldn't let another friend give their goods/services for free or at a discount? Maybe that's a generational thing. If someone as rich at Rebecca knew her best friend was just starting a business and still paying loans, she would've offered to pay for Elise's services. Actually, no, my biggest complaint is that, I feel like we as as a society should be past half-joking that our partners are horrible, especially on a wedding day *cough Rebecca and Mark * (not a spoiler, this happens in the beginning). Just don't get married.

I loved the friendship dynamic more than the romance, to be honest. Our love interested was fine, but I wasn't head over heels. Maybe if I saw him more lol

Wedding season is stressful enough. More so if you’re a bridesmaid. Or the florist. Or have this weird push/pull dynamic with one of the bride’s brothers. Roll all three into one, and you have the problems facing Elise Ngo in Julie Tieu’s sweet, funny rom-com Fancy Meeting You Here.

The story follows Elise as she pulls double-duty for each of her best friend’s vastly different weddings, and in the process meets Ben Yu, the younger brother of her friend Rebecca. Though the two get off to something of a prickly start, circumstances throughout wedding season keep forcing them together until the banter between the two evolves into something a little more intimate.

But beyond just focusing on Elise and Ben’s secret developing relationship, Tieu also puts an equal focus on Elise’s three bride-to-be friends - Rebecca, Beth and Jesse - and the friendship that the four of them share, specifically how that grows and changes as three of them reach a major life milestone within a few weeks of each other.

Elise’s friends’ weddings are each unique in their own way, in style, in budget, and in how much they each incorporate tradition versus modernity. As someone whose background and culture also features elaborate weddings with traditions that are less commonly seen in media, seeing how Tieu brought these to life was a treat. The traditions felt lived-in: not talking down to the audience, but instead inviting you to join in through Elise’s eyes.

The romance itself is very sweet. The two are all snark with no real bite to it - it’s clear early on that both Elise and Ben harbor certain insecurities that might take the other a while to draw out. But what’s genuinely lovely about it is how willing they each are to let their guard down, to heal, and more importantly to put more focus on themselves.

Fancy Meeting You Here hits the spot for those looking for a romance novel with the vibe of a rom-com movie when those movies were in their heyday. It’s sweet, thoughtful, romantic, and brimming with comedic moments.

Fancy Meeting You Here hits shelves on November 7. Special thank you to Avon for an advance copy for review purposes.

By far one of my “cozy romance” reads going forward. I am not one for unwarranted tension or drama, but plots of love and understanding. Julie always delivers and allows me to root for the couple as units—I did hope that their communication could’ve had a better start but it wasn’t extremely off-putting.

I also do love the details of the wedding planner aspect & it provided insight into how lives & live can flourish even in the middle of professional chaos.

The silliness! The friendship! The flowers! And most of all, THE REP. As always, Julie Tieu nailed them all. Fancy Meeting You Here felt like reading about one of my cousins, who also happen to be a bunch of goofballs who speak Teochew and have the last name Ngo. Elise is a talented florist who isn’t good at asking for what she’s worth, and her business is in trouble. When her three best friends all get married, each of them asks Elise to do the flowers, which means each wedding is a chance to showcase her skills and drum up business. But it also means she has to keep bumping into her friend’s brother, Ben, who’s grumpy and distractingly hot. What follows is a quick, fun story about friends, family, and nonstop weddings, with so many different traditions represented, down to the tea ceremony, long procession with cellophane-wrapped food, and door games. Julie’s books are brimming with authenticity and real family and friend dynamics, and I’m very into the grumpy man who can cook. I wish we'd gotten to understand Ben a bit more, or maybe get into his head, but I loved being in Elise's messy and wacky POV.

Many thanks to @avonbooks and @netgalley for the ARC.

a bit slow for my taste. took about the 50% mark for our couple, elise and ben, to get together. i wasn't super invested at the start, but it got better as it developed into something more. a super cute premise with elise being a wedding florist (and essentially a wedding planner) and ben being a caterer.

i found myself more invested in elise than the romance, rooting for her and relating to her always being on the move. she's very much a perfectionist and always seems to put other people's needs before hers. her friend group is really supportive and seeing them have a heart to heart to reassure elise and remind her to lean on them was very sweet. the ending is kind of abrupt so i didnt love that, but i did really feel for elise, admire her work ethic, and enjoy reading about POC characters i could relate to.

I’m gonna be DNFing this at about 30%.

I feel like this book has potential but Elise’s friends are awful, I can’t stand them and it’s really just affecting my desire to finish this book. I’m also super confused as to how more than one friend is okay with having Elise do the floral arrangements and be a bridesmaid (she’s the maid of honor for one of them) but then complains when she misses wedding events because she has stuff to do for her business. It just annoys the hell out of me. Also basically everybody is taking advantage of her kindness, every step of the way and I just can’t.

This was a fun book, I really liked the whole wedding(s) planning plot, and the friend family! I wasn't 100% invested in the romance because I found some of the MMC's rudeness to the FMC at the beginning kinda sad. I did love the FMC so much though, her spirit and energy were so good to read!

TWs - invasion of privacy by media, potential loss of job

-- ty to the author, the publisher and Netgalley for an advanced copy!