Member Review

Thank you to NetGalley for providing an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review. This was a thoughtful and complex debut novel, please take your time reading it. Possibly some minor spoilers in my review so proceed with caution, but hopefully nothing major. Not a rom-com, for sure, but definitely romantic themes and ultimately a romantic coupling in the two main characters. Some trigger warnings: there are consistent themes of death, struggling with mental illness, and past bullying that's pretty severe. Erin is unhappy and frustrated at work and in her personal life, and she quits her fashion job at the beginning of the story. She's also dealing with survivor's guilt from the death of her best friend Bonnie. Erin accidentally gives away a book to a Little Free Library with the last card she ever got from Bonnie and is distraught. Enter Erin and Bonnie's school friend James, who is frustrated with his lucrative but unfulfilling job and struggles to help care for his mother who has Bipolar Disorder. He's living a half-life between London and his parents' home, and is unhappy in both places. He secretly dreams of becoming a writer but feels stuck in his current life. Both are linked by Bonnie and a shared school history, previously friendly but they are now estranged and Erin is antagonistic upon seeing an adult James. Although they don't realize it, they're also linked by annotations in the margins of the books they trade through the free community library cabinet. Both struggle in their relationships with their mothers, although for different reasons, and both are in unfulfilling temporary relationships in the beginning. Over the course of the book we see them both come to grips with Bonnie's death in their own ways, and eventually start to re-build their bond. There are bumps in the road, as there always are, and some are pretty hard to overcome. Ultimately there's a happy ending, thank goodness. I really did enjoy this book, it was heavy in some parts but definitely worth it.