Levi and June are the supportive, unwavering friends to lovers I always crave but rarely see in romance books. There are no demands, just love and encouragement.
They may have had a 10-year friendship lapse, but there’s no doubt they could have still depended on each other at the drop of a hat. I was rooting for them from the beginning, fake dating and cheating ex’s be damned!

“I will be here, and I will love you no matter what we are going to be to each other.”

While I did truly enjoy this book, I subtracted a ⭐️ for multiple chapters requiring a “push” to get through. Some of the descriptions and inner monologues, while generally lovely, were a bit too winded for my liking. Sometimes I even found my eyes glazing over, requiring a re-read to make sure I absorbed the information.

Reading other reviews, I see some people are upset about Levi’s motivation for the fake dating scheme. As a teenager, I went back to a cheating ex multiple times until I finally learned my lesson. I wouldn’t wish that hurt for anyone, real or fictional. But it’s a lesson most people have to learn on their own. I do not feel that Emma Lord downplayed the cheating or glorified it in any way.

Another sidebar: I grew up wanting nothing more than to have a sister. June and Annie made my childhood wish come back with a vengeance.

Example: “When you have a sister, you don’t realize how much of the way you think, the way you exist, is framed not just by your own thoughts, but hers.” 😩🥹

Overall, I will recommend this book and remember Levi + June fondly!

Thank you NetGalley and St. Martin’s Griffin Publishing for this ARC.

The break up pact was such a cute book!!

Friends to lovers plot — June + Levi grew up as best friends and then grew apart for a full decade before accidentally reuniting as their simultaneous break ups went viral online.

I personally enjoy when there is a deeper subplot (in this case Annie) and I felt it added a lot more substance to the book than you would find in a typical cute romance novel.

I felt like there could have been a little bit more revenge taken on Griffin but 🤷🏼‍♀️

Would also love a sequel about Dylan and Mateo!! Overall really enjoyed this one! Thank you Netgalley + St. Martin’s Griffin Publishing 🫶🏼

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC of "The Break Up Pact"

This was my first Emma Lord novel and I was pleasantly surprised by it. The story was cute and entertaining, the plot moved quickly, and who doesn't love a good fake-dating trope? June and Levi have been publicly dumped. As old high school friends, they meet up in their hometown, where June currently lives and Levi goes to get some space. A moment on the beach turns into a social media sensation of the "Revenge Exes" and they roll with it, to help June's tea shop, "Tea Tide," and help Levi get back together with his ex. Their new relationship sparks old feelings, and what begins as fake, ends in real feelings.

The characters had a lot of baggage with each other and the fake dating helped them talk about their past. June and Levi both mourn the loss of June's sister, Annie, and she becomes an important secondary character in the story. Both Levi and June try to hold on to Annie's memory by living a life they thought she would want them to, but in the end, they both realize, living their own lives would have been what she wanted.

While the story focuses on characters around their thirties, they both seemed younger and by reconnecting, fell into their high school selves. Their friend and sibling relationships were very surface level, despite how close they could have seemed. The relationship they had with Annie seemed to be the focus of the story, not their dating debacles.

Overall Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Spice Rating: 🌶️🌶️

Loved this book. It was filled with sweet nostalgia, grief, a love that had been budding since childhood. Would read again!

TW: death, grief, infidelity

Pub Date: 13 Aug 2024

Overall love this. It was super sweet and made me want to open my own small business (ie the female dream of owning a small bookstore with some wine component to it ). My main issue was it was slow to start and slow to wrap up. It feels a lot longer than it really is. Yet this has all the fun romance tropes/vibes: fake dating, childhood friends, second chance romance and secret feelings.
I’ll be recommending this to all my girlfriends

This was a fun and easy book to read. The premises of friends to lovers has been done before but this one still kept me reading. I enjoyed getting to know the characters and laughed along the way!

4.5/5
Where do I start? My heart was sooo into this book that I read it all in one sitting. Small town romances are completely my vibe and this really hit so hard. June is so neurotic but realistically she's dealing with the aftermath of her own guilt after her sister passes away. They had planned to do the Tea and scone place together but June was traveling with her boyfriend at the time. The boyfriend just so happens to be famous and a bit of a douchecanoe if I'm honest. When they break up, June goes back to her home town to give the place her all but she's really struggling. She doesn't want to change much because it was her sisters vision, and while she has her own visions for it she just can't bring herself to it. She gets dumped in such a public way that she's a meme. Then we have Levi, who is a bit of a recluse. He's a writer and is back in town after his own very public and humiliating breakup and runs back into June again. It has been hinted throughout the book that they have history and they didn't speak for a very long time. They decide to get the press off their back after being caught in a very friendly but cozy looking moment, to fake date and become the Revenge Exes. The story has humor but also has some moments of sadness. It's really about people learning to find themselves after tragedy and relationships that in the end were just more comfortable. It's about going over the past and fixing miscommunications. There is a HEA but it's absolutely after them working on themselves.

I really couldn’t get into this one. Normally I love a romcom, but this plot was far too contrived and convoluted, and the characters weren’t interesting enough to help me get over that.

June and Levi, the main characters, find themselves in a fake dating situation in order to get their exes back after both were publicly dumped. Their characterization was pretty poor - I had no feel for their second chance relationship or for them at all (so didn’t care about it).

I found the plot just a bit lame too - why would anyone care about the nobody ex of a d-list reality star and the nobody ex of the non famous fling of a current star? Especially to the degree they’re following the pair of them around taking photos. Or posting photos on a high school Facebook group 10 years after the fact.


So, not one for me. I’m glad it’s over.

BUP

This friends to lovers, fake dating, 2nd chance romance-ish novel starts out very sweet. The female lead takes over her sister’s scone shop after she dies and she spends a lot of the book working through her grief. Shes dumped and is a meme. Her old high school friend is also dumped very publicly. They inadvertently end up posing as “revenge exes” for publicity for her tea shop (which is failing financially) and to help his ex get jealous. There’s a LOT going on and it didn’t work for me.

I’ve read other books by this author and so I was NOT prepared for this level of spice and detail.

While I usually like when Rom Com characters have more depth than just the love interest. I also understand losing a sibling would be very impactful, but it was uninteresting to me.

There are also too many side characters and side stories for my liking.

Solid 4 leaning towards a 4.5...will be putting it in as a 4.25 on StoryGraph. Thank you NetGalley for the ARC of this upcoming book. I've read books by this author before but this is definitely my favorite. The characters were fun, likable and had some good inside jokes between them. I liked the progression between June and Levi's story. There were a few frustrating choices at times but overall it was a very enjoyable read. I loved all the scone flavors!

I typically really like the friends to lovers, but this was missing something for me. I will complete a more in depth review once st martins press acknowledges their readers concerns

Captivating from start to finish, this romance novel weaves a spellbinding tale of love and self-discovery. The characters are richly developed, and the author's vivid prose brings their emotions to life. A perfect blend of passion and heart, this book is a must-read for anyone seeking a delightful escape into the world of love and romance.

recipe for this book

1 tsp childhood friends
2 cups fake dating
1/2 cup second chance romance
1000 cups secret feelings

I JUST WANTED TO EAT THIS BOOK UP! i loved them, i shipped them, i was attracted to them, i was everything (that sounds very unhumble). im a sucker for guys named Levi (if ur name is levi call me)

warning: the first chapter is SUH-LOW, but push thru it, it suffered from reverse middle book syndrome. closer you get to the middle, the better it gets!! like a warm freshly baked scone. <3

(i got this early bc netgalley spoiled me but i would've paid for this TWICE, that's how much i loved these characters)

Something I love about Emma Lord's books has always been the way she writes friendships. Whether or not the closest friend is the love interest, there is such a value placed on platonic love and in connection, and I always believe in the connection between the characters that Lord wants us to believe and that is so critical for a romance. Levi and June have that connection.

I also think the reason June and Levi didn't talk for years was adequately explained, and Lord didn't try to force anger and "dislike" to fit some sort of dislike to lovers trope. In fact, no matter how hard June tried to be mad at Levi, she couldn't - because that's the nature of their connection and their history. I did like the point that it wasn't a misunderstanding that kept them apart but just aspects of their personalities that they had to grow around and that would have gotten between them even had they stayed together.

Annie's influence on their lives both when she was alive and still now with her gone was well done, as were the complicated emotions around that influence. I enjoyed the setting in a little town where it seems like everyone stayed or came back to after graduation, because that's a unique dynamic and it did a lot to strengthen the bonds, history, and care between all the central and even peripheral characters.

I enjoyed the development of June and Levi's individual arcs and how those related to their relationships to their respective exes, as well as to each other. And, of course, I was deeply invested in June and Levi together. Emma Lord has once again firmly cemented herself as an author from whom I will read everything she writes.

The Rom-Com story of June & Levi has a complicated back story: high school friendship, estrangement, and different paths keep them apart until they both experience public and humiliating break-ups. They met again in their small hometown and a plan for revenge is hatched.

The situations in their fake dating revenge plan were a bit convoluted for me and definitely impacted my lack of enthusiasm for the characters and their story.

Thank you to St. Martin’s Press & NetGalley for the complimentary eArc in exchange for my honest opinion.

June and Levi are child-hood best friends who have been distant with each other for the last decade, but end up reconnecting when both of them go through incredibly public break-ups with their even more incredibly horrible respective partners. They decide to flip the narrative & fake date (best trope) with the help of my queen, Sana, until........ maybe they aren't really faking it that much anymore??

I absolutely loved everything about this book. There is soooo much tension, and when June & Levi get together (this is not a spoiler, this is a romance book, what do you think is going to happen?) I was like... woah, now what? and it's A LOT in the best way. The "fake dates" were so much fun and the writing was so well done, I felt like I was playing trivia with the 40 year old gang and screaming poetry.

2 years prior to the story starting, June's sister, Annie (who was also Levi's best friend), passes away. I love how well Emma Lord wrote about the relationship of the sisters and how June and Levi both worked through their grief separately, but also together.

Something that is so well done in this book, that I find lacking in other romance books, was the main characters ability to communicate. They didn't bock down when one of them said something the other didn't like, they actually truly worked through their feelings. I do think a lot of that is because, they had 10 years to think about what to say, but regardless, it made for a good book.

P.S. I NEEEED a Sana book

This book wasn't for me. I've read all of Emma Lord's YA books and enjoyed them (some more than others) so I did have fairly high expectations for her first adult romance. I struggled to like the main characters—they felt very one-note—and they didn't have much chemistry. Also, especially compared with Emma Lord's YA, I felt that both the characterization and the plot lacked depth. I'm thinking particularly of Begin Again (which I really enjoyed) which also dealt with grief, but did so in a more successful way.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This book was amazing! I love the setting and the characters! I would definitely recommend this book to another romance lover.

I love Emma Lord and this one was such a cute book. Long lost friends reunite after 10 years and a series of breakups. I really enjoyed this book, it was fun and feel good, I liked it.

This book definitely wasn't for me. I just couldn't get into it; it felt more like a task than a pleasurable read. It had its cute, romcom charm, with decent writing, but somehow, it wasn't enough. There were a few reasons behind that.

First of all, let's introduce you to the plot. June and Levi, distant for a decade, fake a relationship after their viral break-ups. With the internet convinced, they dive into some fake dates to save June's tea shop and teach Levi's ex a lesson.

Yes, teach Levi's ex a lesson. My first issue with this book was definitely Levi and his somewhat obsessive attitude towards his ex, who cheated on him. He felt a sense of responsibility for it, saying things like:

"Because I know what drove Kelly to cheat. I'm not excusing what she did, but—I can see it from her point of view."

I wanted to believe that his behaviour would get a response from June, but unfortunately, none of that happened. So we were left with these words, like they made sense.
However, Levi pathetically waited for his ex after her fling, despite supposedly being in love with June.

June wasn't much better in their story. Despite being publicly humiliated by her boyfriend of 10 years, she felt the need to be kind to him, referencing their decade-long friendship. Girl, are you okay? It's clear that the friendship ended when your public humiliation wasn't a concern for him.

That being said, the main characters gave me the biggest ick possible. I disliked their behavior, and it's challenging to enjoy a romance when the main couple is so unlikable. In general, it was a cute story with genuinely funny parts, but the lack of personal connection to it made it not fully enjoyable for me.

Special thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with the chance to read an ARC ahead of publication in exchange for my honest review.