Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Spice: 🌶️🌶️
Scroll vortex: 🌀
Jaw-clench: 😬😬
Format read: 🎧 (1.5x speed)⁠
Days read: 🗓🗓🗓🗓
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When Amelia runs away from the shambles of her life in San Francisco, she finds herself on a small island in Greece striking up with the only other guest at the tiny hotel, another American named James. They end up accidentally married and owners of said hotel by way of meddlesome locals and a lot of alcohol. Amelia must decide whether to stay and play it out or run away back to San Francisco.
⁠
👍 Thumbs up:⁠
- it’s giving mama mia… I can hear the ABBA soundtrack playing now…
- amazing descriptions
- narrator did such an amazing job, especially with a variety of accents
- I went from not liking either character to genuinely cheering for them at the end - the author did character development well
⁠
👎 Thumbs down: ⁠
- I definitely thought the conflict was gonna be more intense
- miscommunication trope, which is not my favorite

⁠Thank you to NetGalley for a copy of this audiobook, I really enjoyed it! It exceeded my expectations for a romance!! I’ve been very into any novel with travel / Europe / quaint vibes so this fit the bill to a T. It gets five stars because I rarely found myself distracted, the author hooked me slowly, and the tension between the two main characters is so excellent and builds so well. Prepare for a slowwwwww burn. This book put Greece in the top 3 of places I want to go.

A cute and fun RomCom that mostly stays away from
insufferable Romance tropes.

This is a sweet story about starting over and finding your place in the world, and I loved the Greek Isles setting. It left me eager to visit the area again, long a favorite vacation spot of mine.

I like seeing a heroine who is lost rather than a tragic victim lead these types of stories, and I appreciated that there was plenty of humor and hijinks to offset the romance. It makes the story more fun, less maudlin, and less cringey than many books in the genre. I also appreciated that the love interest was also more lost soul than tortured one.

The story does have some frustrating tropey aspects and the ending definitely veers unnecessarily into schlocky romance, but you’re certainly rooting for the happily ever after here, and there’s more than enough good stuff to offset the few hokey aspects of the story .

Cute rom-com with Mama Mia vibes. I think I would have liked it more if I read it instead of listening to it on audio because I didnt love the narrator.

Thank you NetGalley for this ARC!

3.5 ⭐

I was instantly drawn to this book based on the cover and the description cause it just screamed Mama Mia inspired.

I am happy to say the Mama Mia vibes delivered, this was really fun! It's 100% a rom-com!

The romance is a slow burn, but really enjoyable, I loved how they where thrown in together from the start. I really liked the tricked into marriage and now you inherited a hotel trope.

the setting is stunning, a hotel overlooking the beautiful blue water of Greece was so easy to picture while reading. it was easy to picture the island from Mama Mia as an inspiration

The characters were fun, Amelia is not the best person in the world she makes really dumb decisions but you can't help but to love and root for her.

such a great escape read if you wanted a quick, funny getaway to Greece!

thank you Netgalley, Sierra Godfrey and blackstone publishing for a copy of the audiobook in exchange for an honest review!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an early copy of this audiobook.

A 3.5 star read.

There's something about this book that is stressful. I know it's a fun romp in Greece, but it's also like, hey, you're now given a failing hotel! And you have no money! Just figure it out! And listening to everything get piled on really brought up the feeling in life of "I can't handle one more task" which...is kind of the point the author was making with this. It's not supposed to be lighthearted and enjoyable (at the beginning) so it's not a complaint against the book. Just an observation. If you want to feel the stress of life piling up, then this book will do that. If you want something easy-breezy-beautiful-rom-com, then the first half of this book might not be the way to go.

Don't get me wrong, it's not heavy. But if you're currently struggling with life repeatedly kicking you below the belt, maybe wait to read this.

At 41% there's an error, with a repeat of a line, where the character says, "It's what happens when you can't pay" and it took me back when CDs used to skip.

Anyway, this is a cute story. I do think I found it hard to connect with the MCs because I just didn't really understand WHO they were. What were their interests? We got a little bit of Amelia being an extrovert, and James being an introvert. We heard a tiny bit about James's life plans, but I still wanted to connect with them more.

I was also BEGGING these two to communicate. They could have saved so much time and angst and jealousy if they just, I don't know, had a brief conversation. There wasn't miscommunication necessarily, there was just a lot of NOT communicating. And I guess in the end you find out that both characters really like to run away from their problems and avoid them so I guess the no communicating thing makes sense, but it's also frustrating.

I did enjoy the information and peculiarities about Greek life. I've never been and it's somewhere I've always wanted to visit, and this book definitely felt a bit like I was being dropped into a very Greek, very nosey small town.

I found this book to be so enjoyable! I loved the story so much! I flew through it and didn’t want to put it down!

For the first 30% of the book I couldn’t relate to Amelia — I liked James from the beginning introduced to the story — I started to feel more empathy towards Amelia once her mother got involved — it strongly reminded me of my own mother -daughter relationship. Around 50% in — I really started to enjoyed the story and I started to get invested in the story and the all the characters— the people of the greek village , the hotel and the outcome for James and Amelia . Really enjoyable listen — the narrator did a good job and her emotionality got better as we went throughout the book.


Thank you to netgalley and blackstone publishing audiobooks . This is my honest review .

Down on her luck Amelia decides to take a three month holiday to travel through Europe, finally settling on a small Greek island with connections to her family. Things go from bad to worse, however, after too much day drinking at a local wedding and soon, she is tricked into marrying a fellow guest at the hotel and inheriting said hotel. With much bickering, the two decide to run the hotel during it’s busiest season for the sake of it’s former owner and quirky residents. But as the end of Summer nears, Amelia must decide if she is ready to return to her old life, or if the new one she has created is worth sticking around for.

Sierra Godfrey’s sophomore novel is filled with all of the elements that make a book fun, engaging and oh so bingeable. I will be honest, for the first 15%, I was unsure what to make of it, nor if I liked the main character. This soon dissipated as I began to connect to these interesting and quirky characters and the predicaments they found themselves in. Each character felt multi-dimensional and relatable, ultimately showing a significant amount of growth from start to finish, giving the book such an uplifting feel. And the Greece setting had all of the Mama Mia vibes you could ask for.

ʀ ᴇ ᴀ ᴅ ɪ ғ ʏ ᴏ ᴜ ʟ ɪ ᴋ ᴇ :
🇬🇷Greece setting
📚stories about starting over
📏forced proximity
💍 accidental marriage
🏨hotel hijinks
📺mama mia
✍🏼Phaedra Patrick

Thank you Sourcebooks Landmark and Blackstone Audio for my gifted copies in exchange for my honest review.

I REALLY enjoyed this story of starting over, finding yourself abroad and falling in love with both a person and a place in this strangers to lovers, forced proximity, marriage of inconvenience romance that sees Amelia waking up married after a drunken night at a Greek festival and learning that she and her new 'husband,' James have inherited a ramshackle boutique hotel on a remote Greek island.

Forced to work together in order to pay off the debt the former hotel owner owed before they can sell, Amelia and James have a steep learning curve on hotel management and property improvement as they deal with unruly guests and a cast of loveable locals.

A slow burn full of heart, this was great on audio narrated by Ri Paige and perfect for fans of books like Main character energy by Jamie Varon or Lucy checks in by Dee Ernst. Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an early digital and audio copy in exchange for my honest review!