Marcela is in love with her best friend, but now that he’s engaged, she knows she need to get over it. At her best friend’s engagement party, Marcela runs into his older brother Theo, who is in love with the bride to be, Theo is drunk and ready to confess his feelings, but Marcela stops him and brings him back to her place to sleep it off. When they show up the next day at brunch together, everyone assumes they hooked up, so they decide to lean into it and start a fake relationship. I loved the premise of this and thoroughly enjoyed this book. Marcela was a great character and I appreciated her growth throughout the book. My only complaint is that I wish we got more from Theo’s point of view.

I had a good time with this book! Following a librarian and an ex-NFL player getting over their exes in an interesting love square was a nice change of pace from my usual romance reading. Marcela and Theo are a fun couple, exploring steamy attraction while coming to terms with their own feelings.

I would recommend this book to romance readers that like a friends with benefits and fake dating story along with a love square and will they won’t they vibes.

An ARC copy was provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Wow! Yes please and thank you! This was phenomenal. I had so much fun with Theo and Marcela. I loved that they were in it together from the start and it was meant to be a rebound, not making the engaged couple jealous. It wasn’t a show, it was all real. A loooootttt of talk of trust and honesty here which I loved. Two people who make each other better and hold each other accountable! So swoony and sweet. I love Theo, need him in my life.

The Next Best Fling was a sweet and very readable romance. It took a few chapters for me to get into it, but I was hooked once I did. While I didn’t fall in love with this book, I will be am eagerly awaiting the next book in in the Librarians in Love series which is probably (hopefully!) about Angela.

✨️ ARC Review ✨️

Happy Monday, bellezas! I'm back with yet another review and this one might be the one responsible for the current heat wave.

"The Next Best Fling" by Gabriella Gamez is one of ny favorite debuts of the year, and it gives us the story of Marcela, a plus-size librarian with a heart of gold, a love for YA books, and hopeless romantic. And Theo Young, an retired NFL player, brother of the man she's been secretly in love with and, according to everyone, he's bad news. But they both have something in common, they are in love with people who are engaged to someone else. Theo is in love with his brother's fianceé and planning to confess on their engagement party. But when Marcela stops him she convinces him to sleep at her place, leaving evryone thinking that something more was happening.

Not clearing up the rumos becomes beneficial for both of them and soon they decide to become eachother's rebound in order to forget the people from their past. However, what starts as a fling soon grows into something deeper and what they have is not enough.

Well, how do I say this? I LOVED IT! This book is filled with drama, angst, banter, book references, and great spice! You can really see the characters change and grow, the romance bloom slowly, and it was a lot of fun. Also, Theo was such a great MMC, very caring and patient. It was perfection! I will totally continue with the series.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫/5

This book comes out TOMORROW, July 9, 2024. Make sure you pre-order this baby! Huge thanks to @netgalley and @readforeverpub for the ARC. All opinions are of my own.

This book was cute, but unfortunately not super memorable or a stand out read to me. I'm rating it a 3 star. I enjoyed the book, but overall I didn't just *love* it.

This book is a bit chaotic because there is a bit of a love square happening. Marcella is in love w/ her best friend Ben. Ben is marrying his long time girlfriend Alice. Ben's brother Theo is in love with Alice. Marcella and Theo "fake date" to get over Ben and Alice. It was MESSY.

Ben is actually a horrible character and I hated every single scene he was in (which is a lot of the book because he is a main character lol)

Overall, I enjoyed this book and I think this author has a bright future with her story writing! I will consider picking up her next books so long as there isn't a character like Ben lol

The Next Best Fling by Gabeiella Gamez is the quientiitial in love with your best friend and in serious need of healing story!! Marcella was so head over heels in love and Ben was so completely oblivious to what was right in front of his face. Although I loved this story , the mmc ( bestie ) was such an annoyance that Marcella definitely deserved more in the relationship, whether platonic or not

A quick and easy spicy read. Some of the plot was a bit messy and I would have like a bit more of an emotional connection to and between the characters. Overall it was an okay read. 2.5 stars

If you’re looking for a messy, drama filled, spicy, HEA romance, read this book!

The Next Best Fling 🌸 ARC Review
publish date: 7/9/2024

Marcella is a very strong and capable FMC despite her past struggles in life. Theo is our misunderstood golden retriever MMC. These two are perfect together and I loved how their pasts brought them together even if I was in a very messy way. The banter, the love, the tension, the SPICE! Lastly, I just love a man who figures out what they want and just goes for it, Theo is that man! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️, would recommend!

🏷️debut novel | romance | netgalley | arc reader | bookstagram | book review | spicy romance

Thank you to @netgalley, @gabbywritesalot & @readforeverpub for this advanced reader copy!

The Next Best Thing is an affecting romance with good banter and interesting characters. Marcela is a plus size woman. Her experiences as such are well portrayed. She has confidence in herself, and Theo is attracted to her as a fat woman, but she has to deal with a world that sometimes is not accepting or kind. I thought it was a well-balanced portrayal of life today as a larger person.

Marcela’s love for her unavailable friend struck a true chord for me. While not being in the same situation, I had a lot of experience when I was younger accepting only crumbs from the wrong people instead of what I deserved. The depiction of the ongoing inner conflict in Marcela over her feelings for Ben was true to life for me.

I am looking forward to the next book in the series. Thank you to Forever (Grand Central Publishing) and NetGalley for the advance reader copy. All opinions are my own.

3.75 stars rounded up to 4 stars!

Thank you so much to Forever (Grand Central Publishing) for the ARC of this book via NetGalley. These are my honest thoughts!

I was HOOKED on this book from the very beginning! Marcela is such a strong female lead in this book, caught in a weak moment of loving her best friend of ten years, who gets engaged to his girlfriend right away. Enter best friend Ben's brother, Theo. There's some underlying family drama that Marcela isn't privy to, until the engagement party night, where we find out that she's in love with Ben, and Theo's in love with Ben's fiancé. Yikes. Marcela stops Theo from making a fool of himself, taking him back to her apartment to sleep it off, and then the fake dating scheme begins.

Theo and Marcela actual become friends, and the fake feelings don't feel so fake. Swoon.

Okay, so I was hooked on this book from the get-go, so you might be wondering why it only gets 3.75 stars? There were just a few things that bothered me as I read.
- lots of repetition; we know Marcela has abandonment issues, we know that she's been pining for Ben and that she needs to get over it... we heard it enough times that I couldn't forget. Ever.
- By the end of the book, we know that Theo was into Marcela nearly from the beginning of their fake dating. There just weren't enough HINTS ABOUT IT along the way. I was honestly just waiting for him to blow it up and do something terribly wrong. But it wasn't the good kind of tension building between them? It just didn't work for me.
- Marcela is incredibly insecure. As an insecure girlie myself, I get it. But I would've loved for us to move past it and/or for Theo to establish some trustworthiness so that Marcela had someone being confident for her.
- Too much internal drama. Found myself skipping some of the repetitive thoughts/actions/lines of thinking.
- Too much deceit or perceived deceit. Is Theo the bad guy? Is Ben? Is the fiancé? Is the fiancé's bff? Is Marcela the self-sabotaging one who will ruin it all? It felt very high school, but not in the Taylor Swift way ;)

This was a strong book, and I'll definitely pick up whatever Gabriella Gamez comes out with next. But I won't be buying a shelf copy of this one for my shelves... make sense?

Unfortunately, this is going to be a DNF at 30%.

There isn't anything troubling about it; it's pretty okay as far as debuts go... It's just sadly not working for me.
You can easily get into the story, and it has a fun plot, I guess, but I just feel that I'll ultimately end up rating it a 2.5/3 star read.

The premise of "she wanting the groom and him wanting the bride so they just fake with each other to get through it" is tricky to get emotionally invested in because it's always the question of "are they truly over the other?".
There's also a few other small nitpicks that started to annoy me...

What you can expect:
• librarian fmc
• ex nfl player mmc
• best friend/ex's older brother
• fake dating
• rebound/no-strings attached
• plus size/Mexican American fmc

*𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘬 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘶𝘵𝘩𝘰𝘳, 𝘕𝘦𝘵𝘨𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘺, 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘍𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 (𝘎𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘊𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘭 𝘗𝘶𝘣𝘭𝘪𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨) 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘷𝘪𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘮𝘦 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘢𝘯 𝘢𝘳𝘤 𝘪𝘯-𝘦𝘹𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘢𝘯 𝘩𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘳𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘦𝘸*

while the FMC trusted her secret crush/bff even though he had strung her along for years, it was nice to see that the actual plot didn't expect us to follow suit, instead providing the much better match of the family black sheep.

This was probably more like 3.5 stars for me. I really enjoyed the big girl and Mexican American representation and the scenes in the library.

What didn’t work for me was the way some of the characters interacted with each other. For example, I think turning to alcohol and binge drinking is something young people do, but it was a focus in multiple scenes and I they had handled their emotions differently.

I will be interested to read another book by Gabriella Gámez. There was something about this book that made me want to keep reading.

“If you need me to show you how much I want you. . . That can be arranged.”

I was blown away by this debut! I’ve been in a reading slump since the beginning of June, and The Next Best Fling by Gabriella Gámez lifted the foggy cloud!

“I love watching you come apart.”

For years, he’s been pining after his brother’s fiancée, and she’s been pining after his brother. 🙃 When he almost ruins his brother’s engagement party, she’s there to rescue him. Deciding to get over their first loves, they get into a no-strings-attached relationship that definitely has more strings involved than they dare admit. 🤭

I was SO GIDDY reading this book! Theo had me swooning! I love how he pays attention to any little detail Marcela gives him. The library date he devised had me with heart-eyes. 😍 And I was not ready for the spice! 😮‍💨

I really can’t recommend this enough. It was so good! If you’re looking for a light romance book to read this summer, The Next Best Fling by Gabriella Gámez is it!

🫠 fake dating
🤭 no-strings-attached
🏈 ex-nfl player x librarian

This was such a cute read! The spicy was just enough that it didn’t overpower the plot and the characters are dynamic which keeps the pages turning. The only reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 is because it took me a minute to get into the book at first but once it got going it was SO good! I can’t wait to read the next book!

THIS IS A SIZZLING ROMANCE!

Please! I need more Plus size Latinas getting a sweeping and sometimes messy love story!
I love a good bookish FMC getting swoons. I enjoyed the family drama and the fake dating. I just really liked this debut romance. It is perfection!

While I wasn't initially sure that I would like this one, it grew on me and I ended up loving it SO SO much! I tend to struggle with stories that start with an MC (or both) who has feelings for or is in a relationship with someone who we know is not the love interest. I'm not entirely sure why, but the trope can leave me with feelings of secondhand embarrassment and unease. At the start of the book, we see Marcela having lunch with her close guy friend, Ben, whom she has had feelings for for years. Now the kicker is that Ben has also been in a committed relationship with someone else for years. At this lunch, Ben tells Marcela that he's proposing to his gf. Marcela's subsequent reactions kind of made my stomach hurt. I hated the fact that she seemed to have kept herself on the hook for a guy that was not available.

BUT, when we meet Theo, whew child, haha. This is where the book really got started for me and I could not put it down. I feel like there's just something about an MC named Theo that hits different. I've read a few now, and they have all been *chef's kiss*. I'm also a sucker for fake dating and this was amazing! I love watching their relationship grow and the spice was just the icing on the cake.

Despite my initial feelings about Marcela, she ended up being my favorite. She was incredibly relatable and my heart broke for her so many times. I was so happy with her character growth. The epilogue was so heartwarming (although I wish we got more of a look at their future), and I finished the book with the biggest grin on my face.

Thank you to Forever Pub and Netgalley for a chance to be an early reader. All opinions are my own.

my rating: 4.5 stars

Librarian Marcela Ortiz is devasted when her best friend, and secret love, gets engaged. She has to pretend to be happy for him, and hope no one finds out her true feelings. At the engagement party, she stumbles across the groom's brother Theo Young, drunkenly rehearsing his speech to the bride to break things off. Though she's tempted, Marcela gets him away from the party and has him sleep off this near miss at her place. But then everyone assumes that Marcela and Theo hooked up.

Why I started this book: Librarians, ex-NFL player, and fake dating? What a wonderful mix of careers and tropes. I jumped at the chance of finding a new romance author and requested this ARC from Netgalley.

Why I finished it: This was such a realistic contemporary, and I loved the characters growth. Gamez also wrote a few observations about life that I found particularly apt. Charming book and I look forward to more stories from Gamez in the future.

I want to thank NetGalley and Forever (Grand Central Publishing) for an advanced reader copy of this book.

Brief Summary: Marcela has a career that she truly loves as a librarian in charge of the YA section of books. She also gets to work with one of her best friends (Angela), at least for the time being and is busy starting a book club for local teenagers to get them more engaged in reading. Her love life on the other hand is not so great. Marcela is in love with her other best friend (Ben)...a friend who just announced his engagement. However, when she is reunited with Ben's older brother, Theo, at the engagement party she realizes that she's not the only one who might have unrequited feelings for a member of the bridal party. As Marcela and Theo try and move on from their unreturned feelings it becomes more and more obvious that a whole new set of feelings are coming to the surface.

Thoughts: I absolutely loved this book! Hands-down one of my top 10 contemporary romances ever. Gamez is such a beautiful and thoughtful writer. This book was a delicious mix of My Best Friend's Wedding and a mid-2000s CW drama. I loved every minute of the hot mess that was Theo and Marcela's relationship.

First, Gamez was able to write dimensional characters who felt real and relatable from the moment that you met them on the page. The relationship dynamics between everyone in the book felt real and not forced and although there is plenty of emotion and drama throughout the plot flowed seamlessly.

Marcela is a character that you wish you could be friends with. She had so many layers and as the plot unfolds you get to learn about the people in her life with her. You can also feel the layers of her relationship, childhood, and self-esteem struggles weave in and out of her joyful moments leading kids in book club and meeting with friends. So that she is never just depressed or happy, she's multidimensional.

Theo is also so dreamy. His honesty and vulnerability throughout the book were so swoon-worthy and just like Marcela, Gamez was able to make him a complex character who felt like a real person struggling with real emotional issues that the reader could empathize with.

I loved the way that this romance unfolded and even though it was a bit of a slow burn there was heat on the page very early on. Also, when the steam did come along it was hot. However, Gamez didn't just rely on physical attraction to carry the relationship between Marcela and Theo. She made them take interest in each other's hobbies and likes and dislikes. And when Theo showed up at Marcella's job I had the biggest smile on my face. Plus their grand gestures to each other were so cute/dorky/loveable that I couldn't help but smile.

Gamez also did an excellent job writing the villain of the story. At first, I wasn't sure who I thought was worse because I only had Marcella's point of view and facts. However, the way we learn things right along with Marcella throughout the story developed a villain origin story that I did not entirely see coming.

I would highly recommend this book. If you love swooning, fake-dating, slow-burn, personal growth stories this is a must-read.

Content Warnings
Graphic: Abandonment, Sexual content, Toxic friendship, Alcohol, Fatphobia, and Grief
Moderate: Body shaming, Emotional abuse, and Injury/Injury detail