➸ 3.5 stars

it wasn’t amazing or my favorite but it kept me pretty entertained and engaged! the fmc annoyed me a lot at the beginning but i came to like her more at the end and i thought her and the mmc were cute together once everything was explained between them!

the only thing that had me like wtf was how they named their daughter dot. yup they named her dot…! and the reasoning: “Just Dot, because she is IT. Period. No more.” if my mother named me that i would never speak to her again what was she thinking?!

anyways here are some quotes i liked:

“I’ve never gotten used to sharing my stories because there’s hardly ever been anyone in my life around long enough, or interested enough to tell.”

"I want you for me," he says again. "I want your smiles for me, the ones that I've worked so goddamn hard for that come so much easier for everyone else. I want it to be easy like that for you to smile and laugh with me, not with Oscar and not just with the people at the café. I want you to get everything you want, but I want it to be with me, too, and I don't care if that sounds selfish anymore. I want this house, but I want it to mean something more. I want you to stay with me and I want you to never fucking leave. I want your bobby pins everywhere and your hair in the shower and I want to hear you snore."

thank you to netgalley for the arc in exchange for an honest review!

I will never ever stop rec'ing this book. You want a prickly girlie who scares you and turns you in in equal measure? LaRynn is ya girl. She is bisexual catnip. You want a hero who can build you a table and then lay you on it without fear for the integrity of the legs? Deacon. I was crushed by their past failures and healed by their present day success. I loved the incorporation of their grannies. I love the Cali of it all. MORE OF THIS and by this I mean Tarah Dewitt.

LaRynn and Deacon

Tropes-
🪛 Enemies to lovers
🪚 Forced proximity
🔧 Marriage of convenience
🔨 Second chances

Tarah hit it out of the park with this book! The banter was everything between LaRynn and Deacon! The enemies to lovers aspect with forced proximity was executed immaculately. LaRynn and Deacon had a fuzzy past in their teens that led to years of resentment and then following their grandmother's death led them to be forced to work together to sell their property that was falling apart. Doing any projects with a partner is doomed but these two had the banter down in order to keep the sexual tension to themselves. Add in the downstairs neighbor Sally and these two had to get along to get their property back in working order. These tropes are my absolute favorite and I loved every minute of these two!

Second changed, forced proximity, marriage of convenience and a slow burn - I loved the Co-op by Tarah DeWitt. I mean, really, I love EVERYTHING that she writes.. but this was delicious.

LaRynn returns home to her grandmother's house that she shared with her wife. She is forced to work with Deacon, the grandson of her grandmother's wife. They had a wonderful summer getting to learn each other when they were teenagers, but her heart was broken by him at the end of the summer. LaRynn has a trust fund, but needs to be married to access it. So, she and Deacon enter into a false marriage just as long as it takes to fix up the building, sell it, and make a profit. Of course, it can't be that easy, and it is hard to live together without bringing up old hurts.

The Audiobook was fabulous - Stephanie Rose and Nelson Hobbs spoke clearly and brought such clarity to the story. Just a joy to read!

I am a sucker for an enemies to lovers rom com trope (e.g. The Hating Game), so when The Co-op showed up on NetGalley, I jumped at the chance to request it for review. Now that I have finished it, I can safely say that this book was not at all what I expected, and I mean that in the best possible way. While yes, the enemies to lovers plot did play a part, this story was so much more than that.

LaRynn struggles with feeling like she is enough, due to her complicated relationship with her parents. Deacon’s soured opinion of his father leaves him jaded. When they are thrown back together when their grans leave them a house, LaRynn and Deacon are forced to work through their differences and their complicated histories in order to salvage the family property. In doing so, they learn a lot about themselves and each other.

I adored this book. It reminded me a lot of one of my favorite writers, Abby Jimenez. If you’re a fan of well written, complex characters, with some spice and comedy, you will love this book.

This is a cute summer read featuring both second chance romance and marriage of convenience. The writing is fun, and the banter between the fmc and mmc combined with the dual pov effectively builds tension.

In this renovation romance Deacon and LaRynn are co-owners of the property their grandmother’s left to them, though it’s now falling apart. They have to spruce up the place before they’ll be able to sell it, which throws the two of them together in a doorless space with faulty plumbing. The two “dated” the summer before LaRynn went to college, but only loosely so since neither of them were willing to label themselves as girlfriend and boyfriend in their prior relationship. LaRynn has a trust fund, but has to be married to access the money in her trust, so Deacon offers to marry her to give them the funding necessary to make-over their shared house. These two are at each other’s throats immediately, each one trying to put the other off kilter, until finally the flirting and fighting raise the tension to a point of no return.

I always enjoy a dual timeline, but I found myself wishing this one had been more consistent. The flashbacks were few in number and stopped somewhat suddenly midway through the book. The opening scene, which is in the past, is never revisited through the flashbacks to further explains he situation, and the relationship in the past is never fully resolved. I wish there had been more of the past timeline, since understanding the prior relationship and its failings is so crucial in building a second chance romance.

I liked the characters, but I wish there had been more explanation of the fmc’s inability/unwillingness to share anything about herself, which she overcame somewhat jarringly, and how she got to the point of being willing to open up.

Overall, I think this book was enjoyable, but there were some areas where I wished there had been more.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for the ARC!

Absolutely loved this. I’m not typically a fan of second chance romance, but I just couldn’t get enough of these two.

This book has cemented for me that if Tarah DeWitt writes it, I’m going to read it. She wields magic with her words. Her love stories are deep, relatable, and HOT! LaRynn and Deacon have such a deeply rooted, entangled history and we go on a JOURNEY with them to untangle the web they laid for themselves when they were younger.

DeWitt’s love stories are far from easy, and we find the same in these pages. LaRynn and Deacon both are working through heavy themes! Add in home renovations, grief, and forced proximity and we are IN THE THICK OF IT.

Put this one of your radar if you love:

-Dual POV romance with a little throwback thrown in there as well
-Marriage of Convenience
-Second chance romance
-Enemies to friends to lovers
-Loveable cast of side characters
-Home renovations
-Flawed main characters
-Laugh out loud moments

Also, this one has the BEST, most heartwarming, biggest smile inducing epilogue I have ever read! It was worth the read alone just to see the little peek into the future for these two.

Young love learning its place.

LaRynn and Deacon's story is told through dual POV and two timelines. They meet when their after their grandmothers" home, who had a whirlwind story and a great love of their own. Neither particularly care for one another until one summer changes everything.

Both LaRynn and Deacon have flaws and reason to not trust relationships and giving your heart to someone. They both live with the heartache and "what-if" of the summer that changed everything.

I absolutely ate this book up! It’s a second chance romance and that is my favorite trope. The MCs being forced into a marriage of convenience to get money from their trust fund was icing on the cake. There was a lot that these two had to work through but this was such a fun read. I would definitely recommend.

Ugh. This one was a miss for me. The only conflict was a decade old miscommunication from a 19 & 20 year old. We spend 60% of this book with the characters just being so mean. Like so so toxic. When all they needed was apparently one conversation and then it was whiplash into spice. There was a lot of cliffnoting, like brief descriptions of weeks of time. It got very annoying after while. Even the flashback chapters seemed to not really do much for the story line. At no point in the first 60% of the book was a cheering for the characters to work through things and get together, so when they did I was not invested at all. They went for zero to 60 way to fast.

I got this ARC from NetGalley and this is my honest review.

Tarah DeWitt has done it again! Her writing has a way of immediately bringing me in by the first chapter! Forever a fan of Tarah and her writing! Another beautiful love story

You can never go wrong with a marriage of convenience, and Tarah DeWitt proves that again in this book. The banter and build up between the Hero and Heroine is so good. The emotional topics interwoven with the funny quips was done so well. It also felt very genuine with the amount of time passing from beginning to end.

Thanks to Netgalley and St. Martin’s Griffin for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts are my own.

THE CO-OP is a strong enemies-to-lovers/marriage of convenience romance novel. The banter and the sexual tension between the two MCs is unmatched. The two MCs are genuinely so mean to one another, but IT WORKS.

If it wasn’t for the second chance romance aspect of this novel, I do feel that this book would have the potential to be a new all-time romance read for me.

A majority of the book includes dual timeline chapters that lead up to the event that caused the MCs to break up in the past. However, it feels like this event was kind of brushed over, not addressed in a past timeline chapter. Then the dual timeline suddenly stops around the 70% mark?

This story grasped my attention from the start. The writing is witty and the story is fast paced. The characters are clearly defined and rooted in their past. However, the last 30% of this novel just fell short for me, and I feel this ultimately impacted how I viewed the characters’ respective growth and development at the end of the story.

The Co-Op was such an entertaining book! If you like a good enemies to lovers story this book is for you. You get to watch both of these characters grow and learn more about each other than when they first met all those years ago. This book had great banter as well!

I hadn’t read anything by this author before so I was pleasantly surprised by how much I loved this book! The story was cute and fun and there was actual character development. I loved the switch between past and present, it made the story more interesting and made me like the characters more.

I went into this with high hopes but was left disappointed. While the writing was great, the stories and characters fell flat for me. If I am not hooked by a book from the very beginning it’s unlikely I will enjoy it, and that was the case here. I didn’t ever feel like I was invested in the plot or the characters.
The lack of communication and adulting between the FMC and MMC was ridiculous. It doesn’t feel like there was ever any maturing between when they were teenagers and adults. I expected the renovation to be a main point but it wasn’t addressed nearly as much as I thought it would be. Other parts felt unnecessary and didn’t add to the storyline whatsoever.

I love Funny Feelings but this one just an okay for me. Still cute and very spicy.

Thank you NetGalley and SMP for the eARC in exchange for honest review.

Second-chance romance is one of my favorite tropes. The potential for angst and all of them feels? Umatched. And The Co-Op definitely serves that!
I love Tarah's voice. There is some melancholy and nostalgia woven in the way this story is told, and I truly love how Tarah's writing makes me feel totally immersed into the story.
LaRynn and Deacon are the types of characters that I love to read about. Messy, trying to find their way, working on themselves, trying to be brave - which sounds so easy but is one of the hardest things to do. Nothing feels more relatable. And rooting for them to find their way back to each other was so easy.
I am a big believer of "meant to be" and "the right moment". The thing about second-chance romance is that it encapsulates both of these: if it's not meant to be at this point of your life, it might find you again at the right moment - if it's meant to be. And LaRynn and Deacon's love story portrays that beautifully.
The Co-Op is another addition to my list of favorites for this year.

Super cute fake dating/forced proximity romance. I love Tarah DeWitts work and this is no exception. It’s a great romance that I highly recommend.