I loved this book. It was such a cute romance of fake fling to the real thing. A taboo of being in love with your best friend for years to only end up with his brother. When the best friend gets engaged and his brother is is also in love with the bride to be. With all the emotions and feelings and grand gestures of love.

The cover grabbed me, and the blurb sold me. It was cute, angsty, a bit messy, but I ate it up — right up my alley!!

As a Latina myself, I also appreciate representation in romance books. Can’t wait to read more from this author!

Wow this has me excited for more from Gabriella , this was Juicy book full of angsty tension and plenty of emotional moments. I was instantly hooked from the very beginning until the end and for the entirety I rooted for Theo and Marcela! I loved these characters so much! Also the plus size representation was beautiful in this

Marcela is a bookish Mexican librarian who's been in love with her best friend/ex for ten years but now he's engaged. On the day of his engagement party, she finds out his brother, Theo, is in love with the fiancée.

She stops Theo from drunkenly confessing his love and they leave the party together and everyone assumes they hooked up. Marcela and Theo play along and then decide to try and get over their feelings by hooking up for real and things get pretty steamy.

I loved the representation in The Next Best Fling and I also loved all the bookish things, the way Theo turns out to be way different than what Marcela first though, and how Marcela learns to be honest with and respect herself and open herself up to the real love she deserves.

I simply can’t express how much I’m in love with this book
It’s a sweet romance with lots of positivity
You are beautiful, you are unique in your own way. Don’t let other people tell you otherwise.

I typically don’t go for books with a love triangle or love square, but this story was so good. We have the main characters who despite their broken hearts, really connect with each other and realize there might be more to their fake relationship. I love Marcela and her love of books. Theo is a dream and not at all what his brother painted him out to be. They made sense to me from the beginning.

Cute, lighthearted romance where two keep each other from emotionally destroying an engagement. If you want a quick romance read, this is the book for you.

This was a really solid debut novel! If you love fake dating and books that talk about books then The Next Best Fling will be right up your alley!

I loved the premise of the book and thought it was a really interesting and new take on the fake dating trope. I loved Theo’s character growth and I definitely think he was my favorite character in the book. I actually even wish the book would have been dual pov so his background could have been even more fleshed out.

I love the conversations about Marcela’s struggle with her weight and body confidence. That was a very related part of the book and pulled at my heart strings because I have felt the same way many times in my life.

I will say I wasn’t crazy about the actual progression of the romance. It felt like too much too fast. I wanted more moments with Theo and Marcela that didn’t revolve around Ben and Alice. It felt like some scenes were a bit repetitive and the book could have been a bit shorter.

Overall, a solid book and I look forward to reading more form this author in the future. Thank you to Gabriella Gomez, Forever Publishing, and NetGalley for the arc.

Thanks to Netgalley & Forever (Grand Central Publishing) for access to this
E-ARC! So cute! Loved the characters & the plus-size rep. Definitely recommend!

Where to begin…. I loved this book! I found myself eager to continue reading and to follow Marcela’s journey through romantic relationships, self-love, and overcoming abandonment trauma.

I enjoyed the emotional depth of the characters throughout this book. The characters seemed well rounded and developed in the best way. I felt connected to multiple characters and found myself really rooting for Marcela and Theo.

They had many obstacles to overcome separately but did so in the comfort of each other - I found their story to be beautiful and wholesome.

The layers to the characters were interesting and realistic on a human level - they were full of good and bad qualities. I find that in a lot of books (especially romance) that the characters seem to fall in love and then all of their “bad” qualities or worries completely disappear.

Yet, I found with this book it did an amazing job with connecting to the reader about how Marcela was feeling emotionally and it made it very easy to either relate to her or understand it. Even with Theo, even though you don’t get his pov, the author did a great job as showcasing how he was feeling through Marcela.

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who loves romance and who is looking for a good, fast read with depth.

I am happy I received an e-arc of this book. It was an amazing read. I’ll definitely be recommending this one to everyone!

Disclaimer: I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. Thank you to Netgalley, Forever, and Gabriella Gamez for this free copy. All quotes in this review are taken from the Advanced Reader Copy and may change in final publication.

Oh my gosh this has to be my favorite book of the year! I could not get enough of it, and I wish I could have called out of work to read it in one shot. Thank you so much for this opportunity again!

One of the things that appealed to me a lot about this book was that Marcela reminded me a bit of me. She has my dream job – being a librarian – and she was able to work on building a teen book club, something that I wanted to do while I was working at my local public library. The difference between us was that hers was actually successful, and I was super happy for her. She’s also more on the curvy side (re: fat, nothing is wrong with being fat and I’m hoping that I can also learn to not think of that word as always having a negative connotation) which so am I so it was nice to see a chubby girl getting some on the cover. Love it so much – oh also huge shout out to Leni Kauffman for such a bad ass cover job as always!

I was debating on whether I should put some of my favorite quotes in this review, but I think I’ll leave it out so that when people read it, they can enjoy it for the first time. So no more quotes in the review unless someone asks me for it directly!

Another thing that I personally really liked about this book was how Theo was really open and honest with Marcela and how even though he was really angry about something that Marcela lied about, he didn’t immediately turn her away and tell her he never wanted to see her again. He let her in and said that even though he was mad, they should still talk about it. I’ve been really liking the fact that more recently published romance novels have been showing their characters work on healthy communication with one another and showing that they are working on themselves and their relationships in a healthy way. Yes, I totally said “healthy” twice, but that’s how much I really appreciate it. There were so many moments in this book where – if this book was written maybe ten or so years ago – they would have had a major blow out, not talk to each other for a few days or even a couple of weeks, and then somehow come back together to talk about the miscommunication that happened with their argument. There wasn’t a moment where one character went “Wait! I can explain!” and then they don’t and the other one gets upsets and leaves before the first person can explain. That was honestly SO REFRESHING and it made me have hope that healthy communication between couples – regardless of status – is possible.

Another thing that I loved that I don’t know if I can say in this to avoid spoilers is what ends up happening between Marcela and Alice. Alice is the woman that Ben proposes to, and Ben is not only Theo’s brother but also the guy that Marcela was pining over for a decade. Marcela and Alice started off as friends but once Ben and Alice started dating, they drifted by the time the book starts. This fragile relationship could have gone in a number of ways, but the way that it did go was just stellar.

SHOUT OUT TO ANGELA! She is the best best friend that Marcela needs in her life. I hope that never changes, and I love that even though Angela doesn’t always agree with Marcela’s decisions, she still stands by her and supports her like a true friend. Honestly, Marcela and Angela have such a strong friendship throughout the course of this book that it’s beautiful to see. I love books that show positive and strong female friendships without any competition or pettiness.

Another way that I relate to Marcela is how hurt she is about her father abandoning her and her mother. That’s exactly how I feel about my own father and how he left my mother, and seeing my mother also single and being the independent boss she is but not finding another romantic love made Marcela’s situation feel pretty close to home. Marcela and her mom have such a close relationship too and it reminds me of my own with my mother. Marcela realizing that her reasons for not wanting to get into an official relationship with Theo because she’s still afraid of abandonment is so close to the chest for me, and I’m glad that she had a conversation with her mother about it.

Shout out to Theo for being one of the sweetest MMCs in a long time! While neither Marcela nor Theo start off perfect, they work together to make themselves better people, and also put in the effort to support each other. I really feel like Theo was one of the main driving forces to this growth with his honesty in a situation that he really didn’t need to be, and I think that Marcela was the reason why. She also held him accountable to change and while there were parts that she did that I didn’t agree with – but understood – knowing that she had Theo in her life to do this with helped her become a better person too. Basically they both worked together to become better, and even though I don’t know if they will show up somewhere in the sequel, I hope that we can continue to see this upward trend of positive change.

All in all, this is one of my all time favorite books that I’ve read, and it’s definitely my favorite book this year so far. It’s only March though, so we will see if it survives by the end of the year, but it was definitely amazing. I highly recommend this one to all the people that love to love love. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

I hate DNFing ARCs, but I have to call this one at 27%. I’ve been trying so hard to get into it. There’s nothing technically wrong with the writing, but it wasn’t super engaging. I think being single POV hurts more than helps in this case. It’s a story that needs the MMC’s POV to make him more understandable and more likable.

The setup is that Marcela is in love with Ben, who’s engaged to a woman named Alice. Ben’s brother, Theo, is in love with Alice. There’s a misunderstanding that leads people to believe Marcela and Theo are hooking up, so they decide to fake date to distract themselves from their feelings for Ben and Alice, respectively.

Now, I LOVE fake dating, but having both MCs in love with other people just didn’t work for me. I wasn’t feeling the chemistry between Theo and Marcela. All I could think about was how they were both into other people and would end up settling for each other — which is not what I want to feel when reading a romance novel. If I had finished this book, I knew it was only going to end up as a 2.5- or 3-star read, and I have too many other books to read to invest time in something I’m not enjoying. I read about the first 100 pages, and they were a slog to get through.

However, I can see myself trying another book by this author. I think this is more of a case of this not being the right book for me than anything necessarily being wrong with the book itself.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC, which was provided in exchange for an honest review.

The Next Best Fling is a really cute romance with a good mix of drama wrapped up in a fake dating trope. I really enjoyed Marcela and Theo's relationship especially when they got out of their own way and am excited to see where the author takes the next book in the series.

This was a nice, quick read for me. Marcela has a problem: her best friend she dated briefly years ago is engaged to another woman. Obviously, she’s heartbroken but she’s not gonna do anything about it. Then we have Theo, the groom’s older brother who’s in love with the fiancée. Marcela overhears him practicing a declaration of love and stops him from doing so. But that leads everyone else to think they’re seeing each other. So they go with it.

Things were a bit messy considering the familiar relationships in the book, but I really liked the two together. They were easy to root for.

Thanks as always to NetGalley for the ARC.

This had so much trauma digging! It was a whole overhaul of moving from unhealthy to healthy from friendships to relationships.

I still loved it. Marcela has been in love with her friend Ben since they dated in college, only for him to say he didn't think they were comparable and he started dating her roommate. Nearly a decade later, she's still hooked on him and he relies on her too, including her opinion on the ring he picked out for his soon to be fiance. She's heartbroken but willing to do anything to make his wedding dreams a reality. This happens to take the form of emotionally detoxing with his estranged brother who is not so secretly in love with the bride to be. But as they continue to fake date and rely on each other, real feelings creep in and real revelations regarding her friendship with Ben.

I loved seeing how good replaced bad, how the true colors came to light, and how bride and groom handled it all. I wanted to cheer at some points.

#arc
#netgalley
#thenextbestfling

I love a fake dating, best friend's brother romance. Add in a sports romance element and I'm sold.

On top of including some of my favorite tropes, this book brought diversity without making it an example of diversity. It was so nice to read what felt like a heartfelt and honest story about a fully formed woman who was in touch with her culture. Adding in the touches of her family life and welcoming others through food was a very special moment. Many books that attempt folding in an ounce of diversity make it a teaching moment. As a society, we put so much pressure on underrepresented communities to educate the masses. It was nice that different cultures could just *exist* in this book.

Unfortunately, I found the pacing a little jerky. It felt like the mundane parts dragged and the exciting bits flew by. I wish we got to see more of the character's college and pre college life. These characters obviously had a strong foundation of friendship and shared experiences, I just would have liked to have experienced it with them. There were flashbacks in the way that we look back on things, picking apart the embarrassing bits. You know, those things that flash into your mind in the middle of the night and you physically shudder? The flashbacks however mainly focused on the FMC's insecurities. She was so strong and confident as an adult and in her career. It would have been nice for the flashbacks to show that or even better, demonstrate her growth over time.

3.5/5 ⭐️

This book was MESSY- like telenovela messy. I definitely enjoyed the characters and the idea of this book. It started a little slow, but picked up a lot in the second half.

Aspects of this book: fake dating, best friends brother, NFL player, librarian, Hispanic rep

I really enjoyed the representation that was featured in this novel. The plus sized representation and the feelings that Marcela went through with other partners just hit me straight in the gut because plus sized women deserve so much more than what society gives them. The romance between the two of them, and how he was unappolgetically attracted to her and eventually in love with her was everything. The queer representation for her friend was also lovely, and I'm happy to see it.

I did however want to beat them both over the head with a mallet a la whack-a-mole. Sure I am an onimpotent being reading their story and knows the better parts of whats happening between the two of them without them knowing, but still. The amount of miscommunication and lying by omission is very high, and it was a little too much for me. Though I did appreciate the swoon-y-ness that Theo presented.

Also that cover though...

Thank you to Netgalley and Forever Grand Central for an e-copy.

If you ever thought you were in trouble, there is no way to top Theo and Marcela's situation.
She's in love with the groom, he's in love with the bride. What could be worse? He's the groom's brother and she's the groom's best friend. They fall in love while trying to avoid ruining the wedding.
I was honestly a little skeptical about The Next Best Fling, I was wondering how the switch from being in love with the groom to his brother would be and Gamez did it surprisingly well. The reader can tell the switch when the switch to the love interest happens and isn't left wondering if either is still in love with their first love. It was a little less smuttier than I thought it was going to be, with the title being The Next Best Fling, but it was still incredibly romantic and had great movement throughout the book. It was an enjoyable read, however did take me a moment to get into it but I would definitely read again.

4.0 Stars - Marcela has had feelings for her best friend Ben since their college days. However, after almost a decade, Ben has proposed to his long-term girlfriend, Alice, leaving Marcela heartbroken. When Ben's brother, Theo, comes to town for the engagement party, Marcela discovers that he has been in love with Alice for years. Together, they decide to help each other move on from their unreciprocated love by fake dating.

I loved their honesty, accountability, and kindness towards each other. Theo is an amazing book boyfriend, taking time to learn Marcela's likes and planning the world's best date. The book normalizes women's struggle with maintaining a body-positive attitude and highlights the fear of being vulnerable. It's an enjoyable reading experience with difficult sibling dynamics.

Thanks to Forever (Grand Central Publishing) and NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.