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

Librarian Marcela has been in love with her best friend Ben for years, but when Ben gets engaged to Alice, it brings his ex-NFL player brother, Theo, into town. Turns out Theo has been in love with Alice and Marcela saves him from making a scene at the B&A’s engagement party. The pair begin to have a fling to get over their respective crushes, but it of course leads to feelings.

This is a debut novel from Gabriella and I found her writing style very easy to read. I loved that Marcela is Mexican-American, curvy, and a librarian. I adored the librarian / book aspects of the story, I wish I had liked the plot more. It’s unfortunate for this book that Emily Henry’s Funny Story came out a couple months before it and essentially tells the same story more masterfully. I found the drama between the two couples to come across as messy (think CW show) rather than tension-filled and distracting from the romance between Marcela and Theo. NGL I was ready for Marcela to be done with both Ben and Theo by the end of the book. I am interested to see where this series go and will read the next book.

Thank you to NetGalley and Forever for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I really really wanted to like this book; unfortunately a lot of the plot was messy and felt like all over the place.

I received this book from NetGalley as an ARC. I loved this book. I was so happy to read it! I knew as soon as i saw the cover it was going to be good!

The fmcs best friend (who she is in love with), is a total asshole, but his brother? A golden retriever. I felt so bad for both mcs in this whole book. No matter what they did, life wanted to crap on them. But, they figure it out together. And if that doesnt explain what love is, then i dont know what does. This book was super sweet, and also spicy. Theo was a refreshing character, especially as a football player. While his looks describe him as one, he is really just a big teddy bear, who would do anything for Marce. I enjoyed the conversations about trust in this book. It made me feel so much more connected to the characters.

TLDR: Theo is a big teddy bear, ex footballer who deserves everything and Marce is a sweet librarian who finally realizes what she deserves in her life, someone who chooses her. Add this to you TBR right now, and thank me later.

“Live that happily ever after we love to read about so much in books.”

I am such a sucker for romance books with a bookish FMC because it’s one of the ones I relate to so much and this one didn’t disappoint. Marcela was such a sweetheart and so relatable I adored her! I really loved her friendship with Angela, I always love seeing strong female friendship representation.

I’m normally not a huge fan of the love triangle trope but the idea of it being a love square was pretty intriguing to me. But I am a sucker for best friends brother so that definitely sucked me originally!

I really loved Theo as the MMC! He had such great chemistry and Marcela and him buying her books for her collection is literally the sweetest thing.

I’m so glad everything worked out for Theo, Marcela and Alice and Ben got what he deserved. I hated him from the very beginning and was praying he and Alice would break up.

This was such a great debut, I can’t wait to read more from this author!

Thank you to Forever and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review!

Marcela and Ben, after a short period of dating in college, have been best friends for nearly a decade. Ben is newly engaged to his long-time girlfriend, Alice; former best friend to Marcela, and Marcela is doing all she can to not let her true feelings show. At their engagement party Marcela runs into Ben's older brother Theo, a man hell bent on stopping this engagement from going any further. In a pact to use each other to get over other people, Marcela and Theo quickly realize that the no-strings attached arrangement isn't as easy as it seemed.

I could relate to Marcela a lot, as a plus sized woman myself who married the equivalent to a young Justin Timberlake, I have struggled with self doubt and feelings of belongings throughout our marriage. I loved that author Gabriella Gamez didn't show all cards too quickly, which allowed the drama and built up to continue through the climax and into the falling action of the novel. She also didn't fall into the trap of making Theo too perfect which is a pet peeve of mine in romances.

My only dislike was the epilogue. In the romance genre a HEA is a guarantee, it's what makes the romance genre the romance genre and I'm not sure we got one. Maybe we see more of this in the next book in the series, and I'm just too early but I would have liked to see all of the characters in a more settled place.

Thank you Forever Books for the gifted ARC.

Unfortunately this was not the contemporary romance for me. I was so excited for this one as the FMC is plus size but her being upset that another character was proposing to his longtime partner (like 8 years???) just immediately made me not like her. We're too old to be this delusional. I think this bok has it's place but it's not on my shelf.

"The Next Best Fling" by Gabriella Gamez is a charming and spicy debut romance that delivers a delightful mix of humor, heart, and heat. Marcela Ortiz, a librarian with a secret crush on her best friend, finds herself entangled in a no-strings-attached relationship with Theo Young, an ex-NFL player and the older brother of the man she’s in love with. What starts as a convenient cover-up for their unrequited feelings quickly turns into a passionate and complicated romance.

Marcela has been pining for her best friend for years, but when he gets engaged, she knows it’s time to move on. Enter Theo, who drunkenly plans to confess his love for his brother’s fiancée at their engagement party. Marcela steps in to stop him, and one thing leads to another, leading everyone to believe they’ve hooked up. Needing a distraction from their respective heartaches, they decide to keep up the charade.

Theo is a cinnamon roll hero with a heart of gold. Despite his initial attraction to his brother's fiancée, his chemistry with Marcela is undeniable. Their relationship, filled with late-night bar escapades and steamy moments in library aisles, evolves from a simple rebound to something much deeper. Marcela’s journey from unrequited love to self-discovery and acceptance is both relatable and inspiring.

The book is a fun and breezy read, perfect for those who love a mix of humor and drama in their romances. Gamez does a great job of balancing the light-hearted moments with more serious themes, such as body image issues and family dynamics. Marcela’s insecurities about her plus-size figure are handled with sensitivity and realism, and Theo’s unwavering support and admiration for her are heartwarming.

However, the book isn’t without its flaws. The pacing can be uneven at times, with a slow start that picks up significantly in the second half. Some of the plot twists are predictable, and the resolution of the central conflict feels a bit rushed. Despite these minor issues, the story’s charm and the characters’ chemistry keep you hooked until the end.

Overall, "The Next Best Fling" is a sweet and engaging romance that will leave you smiling. Gabriella Gamez’s debut is a promising start, and I’m excited to see what she writes next. If you’re looking for a light, feel-good romance with a touch of spice, this book is definitely worth a read.

Thank you to Forever Publishing for the ARC!

I am a sucker for a librarian romance, and definitely not just because I am a librarian. I loved Marcela and Theo's romance, but I wanted them both to stop being so hung-up on their unrequited loves. Sometimes Marcela's turmoil over Ben was a little over the top and it made it hard to believe in her and Theo. Overall a good summer read for a debut.

The Next Best Fling gave off plenty of The Summer I Turned Pretty x My Best Friend's Wedding vibes. Marcela has been hung up on her ex boyfriend for almost 10 years but he's now engaged to his girlfriend. At their engagement party Marcela comes across her ex's brother, Theo and learned that he's in love with Alice and wants to break up their engagement. Not wanting that for either Ben or Alice, Marcela stops Theo and they come up with a plan to be each other's rebound. Nothing bad will happen, right? This book was slightly predictable but at the same time I was so frustrated with all of the main characters. I wanted to shake each and every one of that at one point or another throughout the story. The characters I did end up liking were Angela, Andy, and Marcela's mother. Most of the book was Marcela going through such internal turmoil over her feelings for Ben and if the feelings she started developing for Theo were real. The two big "secrets" didn't seem that big in my opinion and I actually wish we delved deeper into Ben's issues and seeing how he never takes responsibility for his own actions. Theo's date idea was the sweetest gesture in the entire story. A cute librarian love story for a debut author. I would be interested in reading future work by Gabriella.

The Next Best Fling
I love an original plot and boy ever will you get one with The Next Best Fling. Marcela has pined over her best friend Ben for ten years since he broke things off claiming they should just be friends. Marcela’s feelings have always been one sided and now Ben is marrying his long time girlfriend Alice. But when Marcela spies Ben’s brother Theo pacing outside the engagement party, she knows something is awry and prevents Theo from embarrassing himself by proclaiming his long time love for Alice. As the two slip away from the engagement party, is it any surprise that everyone assumes Theo and Marcela hooked up? And how bad would it be to allow that false assumption be considered truth? Better yet, Theo and Marcela can use each other to help get over their broken hearts by getting involved in between the sheets.

Let me say, these relationships are Messy with a capital M. That’s to be expected given the reason Marcela and Theo even start a relationship. But Gamez writes “mess” well and I definitely had BIG THOUGHTS about Ben and Alice. Initially they drove me bonkers as both seemed to never be able to stay out of Marcella and Theo’s relationship. One of the main love interests is also probably a narcissist, making this love square even funkier. There were times I really wanted to drop kick Ben (and Alice) for butting their heads in, but I loved Marcella and Theo and that made the stress of the love square worthwhile.

Theo. I never saw him coming and loved the planned date, loved the checking in with Marcela, loved the enthusiasm in the bedroom and for her body, loved the way he always listened and was never quick to judge. For a character who’s typecast as a retired Dallas Cowboy player, Theo surprised me at every turn. This is single POV from Marcela’s perspective so we only know what Theo’s thinking when it actually comes out of his mouth or through his actions. And because he is so good at expressing himself with BOTH, you didn’t even really need a dual POV. Marcela is a very likable protagonist as well and I was so happy to see her come to several conclusions about her friendship with Ben. The irony is that without dating Theo, she probably would have been pining for Ben forever. A few times it felt like Marcela’s thoughts were repetitive and I may not have always agreed with her decision to shield herself from love, but knowing her history with her father and prior love interests helped explain her reactions. I think this is a very strong debut that sets Gamez up for future successes and can’t wait to see what she writes next.

End thoughts: Pick up the book for the crazy plot, stay for the impeccable Theo who knows what book girlies want.

I received an early copy from the publisher. All opinions are my own.

This started off cute and I loved the premise, but I just found it really hard to get through. I especially wanted to love it since it’s a debut from a diverse author, and also had a plus sized main character. My favorite thing about this was definitely Marcela. I found her to be relatable in the way she spoke about her body image issues, and also the way she spoke about her unrequited love. Those are things I think everyone has experienced at one point or another, and I found the portrayal to be really honest. I also loved that she was a librarian and the way she spoke about her love of books.

I just think my main gripe was all the secrets they kept from each other for no real reason. She hid the fact she was in love with Ben from Theo for way too long in my opinion, and it just frustrated me. It overshadowed their love story, but I didn’t really feel the chemistry from them anyway. I liked that they made each other better and Theo was cute in how much he liked her, but other than that Theo felt one-dimensional and I just didn’t believe their romance. Even though they were just hooking up and it wasn’t supposed to be serious, there was no tension or angst and it just left me feeling bored. She went back and forth about Ben so many times and it felt repetitive by the end. There also wasn’t a good resolution with him and Marcela or him and Theo and it felt like something was missing.

Ultimately I would give this author another chance because I really enjoyed the way some of the characters were written. This one was sadly just a miss for me.

Gimme a book with plus size rep ANY DAY!!! And set In Texas, with HEB and Whataburger references?! I loved that! BUTTTT this book was was painful to get through. The plot was silly to me and I felt SO much of the story was spent talking about Ben and her past with him over and over. It overshadowed the "love story" between Marcela and Theo. And I put it in quotes because the chemistry was non-existent. I personally don't like romances where the couple just hook up, it takes away from the angst and tension. Especially when there is no back story between the pair. It felt too much like The Summer I Turned Pretty, but not in a good way.

I had a really hard time putting this book down. The characters find themselves in such a complicated and yet realistic situation, and I kept wondering what would happen next. Marcela has been in love with Ben for ages, and he has just gotten engaged to another woman. Marcela knows something has to change, but she doesn't expect it to be Ben's older brother, Theo. She and Theo stumble into a team situation to support each other through the minefield that surrounds them. I loved Theo's honesty and Marcela's kindness. They make a very good couple.