A beautiful storyline, characters you couldn't help but adore and all the romance. A perfect feel good read

This was a just a great read. I was just all in the story.
Loved the MCs. Lovely written book. i enjoyed more than I expected I would

Rating: 4.5 Stars

Love at First Sight is the gorgeous new novel by Jessica Gilmore that ticks all the right boxes!

Nora might be sick of dating, but she hasn’t give up on finding the one. She still believes that a happy ending for her could be possible – but she just needs Prince Charming to come along and save her from having to kiss yet another frog! When she crosses paths with a handsome stranger who comes to her rescue one night, Nora thinks that all of her romantic dreams are about to come true – if only he didn’t vanish leaving only his business card behind! Nora wonders if she will ever see the man who in a few seconds had stolen her heart ever again, but as luck would have it she bumps into him again and a few weeks later he invites her along to Sicily. Is Nate the man Nora has been waiting for? Or should she be careful about pinning all of her hopes for the future on a man like him?

Sicily is as gorgeous as she had imagined and Nate’s family all welcome her with open arms – except for his older brother Luca, who makes it clear from the off that he doesn’t trust Nora. Although she is aware that he’s only looking out for Nate, Nora cannot help but find Luca rather rude and stand-offish and when Gabe is forced to go away for work, she finds herself having to spend a lot of time in the company of the one brother she had been keen on avoiding.

However, Nora soon comes to the conclusion that there is far more to Luca than she had initially thought and that they might have more in common that she had initially realised…

A dreamy romantic escape that will make you laugh, cry and fall head over heels in love, this swoon-worthy contemporary tale rivals Emily Henry for its witty banter, red-hot chemistry and superb characterisation. Love at First Sight is contemporary romance at its finest and Jessica Gilmore has written a fantastic page-turner that has winner written all over it!

"Love at First Sight" by Jessica Gilmore is a heartwarming and enchanting romance novel that captures the magic and excitement of instant attraction. Gilmore’s writing is known for its emotional depth and relatable characters, making this novel a delightful read for anyone who enjoys stories about finding love when you least expect it.

The story likely follows two protagonists who experience an immediate and undeniable connection upon meeting for the first time. Despite the instant spark, their journey to love is likely filled with challenges, misunderstandings, and the complexities of modern relationships. Gilmore’s narrative probably delves into the nuances of what it means to believe in love at first sight, exploring whether such a connection can truly lead to lasting happiness or if it’s just the beginning of a more complicated journey.

The characters in "Love at First Sight" are likely well-developed, with their own backgrounds, hopes, and insecurities that make their connection all the more meaningful. The chemistry between the leads is probably electric, with plenty of romantic tension, witty banter, and heartfelt moments that will keep readers engaged from start to finish.

Jessica Gilmore has a talent for creating romance that feels both dreamy and grounded in reality, making this novel perfect for readers who enjoy a blend of escapism and emotional depth. "Love at First Sight" is an ideal read for anyone who believes in the magic of love and the idea that sometimes, the person you’ve been waiting for might just appear out of nowhere, changing your life in an instant.

This novel promises to be a charming and satisfying romance that will leave readers with a smile on their face and a warm feeling in their heart. Whether you’re a longtime fan of romance or new to the genre, "Love at First Sight" by Jessica Gilmore is sure to capture your heart.

My Thoughts: this story was like going on holiday without leaving your home, it’s fun, flirty and full of moments that will have you either laughing out loud or shaking your kindle in anger at the characters or frustration because you can see things that Nora can’t!

Nora as a main character was an absolute delight, she’s romantic and soppy, and really believes in love at first sight, the only problem is she’s had so many bad first dates that she’s given up, she’s deleted all the dating apps and decided to leave it up to fate to find her one!

So when her heel gets stuck in a drain and she’s saved by a man, surely that’s the sign she’s been waiting for?!

The only problem being she didn’t get his name or his number so she uses her expertise as an heir hunter to find him! – she gets swept off her feet and taken to meet the family in Italy, but as soon as they land Gabe disappears for work!

This is a typical story of right place, right time but wrong person in a beautiful setting and is perfect for fans of romantic comedies, it read like a movie and I really enjoyed it.

This one was a nice read, solid four stars, easy to get through, good characters and good development of both relationships and friendships too. I liked the Sicily setting that was beautiful and made me want to go immediately and I just thought this read was perfect for summer. It was quite lighthearted whilst also romantic and explored a few deeper topics. Would highly recommend!

Nora is an excellent central character in this escapist read. She is full of contradictions but that is because of her past. On the one hand she likes the feeling of being with a family and yet she has withdrawn from people following a few bad relationships. Friends are very important to her and she has a tight knit set of them from her childhood. She is desperately lonely after the deaths of her grandparents and mother. A romantic at heart, she is longing for a great love affair and to find the ‘one’. In her search to have the love at first sight which her mother described, she ignores the shortcomings and lack of consideration which Gabe shows.

I particularly liked the parts of the story which were set in beautiful Sicily with Gabe’s family. Much of the story centres on Nora’s coming of age as she learns to follow her own dreams and not rely on keeping everyone happy at her own expense. Luca is an excellent foil and so unlike his brother, Gabe. You feel he always listens to her and accepts her for herself. The story is well structured and the text messages between Nora and her friends are amusing and show Nora how her actions appear to others. You also have excerpts from Nora’s mother’s journal and follow her thoughts and actions. Family, friends, true love based on getting to know someone and following your own path in life are all important themes.

In short: finding love and following your heart

I just really struggled to get into the book, the premise seemed interesting to me but the writing style just wasnt working for me to keep me invested.

I have seen Jessica's other book (Love on the Island) and always meant to get around to reading it. So when I saw this pop up, I couldn't wait to take part in the tour!

This is a cute easy read which will be perfect for over the summer. The details about Italy are just amazing and really help set the scene. You could really picture it all.

It's not just a romance, there were other things going on in the book to keep you wanting more. I would have loved some more at the end (don't want to give anything away) as I did feel a certain plot just closed too quickly for me.

It was a funny read, you could definitely see this play out well in a film. I found parts a bit quick, I've always said I'm not a huge fan of instalove, but I loved the way the story developed. The friendship group felt very real and I think we could probably all relate to them in our real life.

This one ticked lots of the romance read boxes. An ideal summer beach read.
I found this so easy to read and enjoyed being transported to the Sicilian vineyards. I felt like you needed to read this with a glass of wine in the sun!
The MC had a good backstory and I liked the way the author included that in a different way. The love story was well written and I was routing for a happy ending.
This was a great rom com!

Rating 4.5/5

This time of year I long for stories with a wonderful sense of place, to whisk me off somewhere and make me imagine that I can feel the sun on my face and soak up the culture…and a little romance never hurts. Love at First Sight ticks those boxes and then some, with a beautiful Sicilian vineyard as the setting and the food and the family, I felt transported and I was engrossed with Nora’s story.

I loved that Nora was a romantic and that she created the opportunity for her meet-cute, feeling that spark of infatuation, and was so happy for her when it seemed to work out. That faltered a little when she started trying to be a slightly different Nora to fit into Gabe’s life, which as much as it pains me to say I found very relatable. I’m not going to lie I did start to worry that Nora was going to let ‘fate’ play too much of a hand in her life and then end up with someone all wrong for her because she is such a fun and quirky character and was letting herself be moulded a little, but luckily my worries started to disappear when she got to Sicily.

The slow burn of the connection between Nora and Luca was delicious, especially because they were really having to fight against it. I did get slightly frustrated at her always sticking up for Gabe and trying to portray him as a different person to people who clearly know him very well, but understood that it came more from a place of guilt and longing to fit in.

I was glad that Gabe’s family could be honest about who he was and that Nora’s friends were being upfront with her about their thoughts on the relationship. It was refreshing to see the honesty about their personalities and it helped to highlight why they maybe weren’t the best match for each other. These characters also made the story, I love a story with a big family, the mix of personalities and the warmth that it brings to the story, especially when there is also the found family with Nora and her friends, it got a little emotional at times.

Nora’s story is also interspersed with her mother’s in the form of letters, that chart her adventures, her lost love and her life with Nora. I enjoyed these as Nora’s family are important to her so it was lovely to get a little extra insight into their life.

The one thing I did struggle with at times in this story was the miscommunication, now I can usually give a little leeway for a story because it is fiction after all, however, there was one aspect of the story that I found it tough not to get a little annoyed at Nora about. If you don’t like spoilers skip to the next paragraph…it pained me that Nora didn’t set them straight about the engagement, I could understand the first bit of confusion but when she started actively leaning into it I struggled, I know it provides a catalyst for Nora to confront her feelings but I couldn’t suspend my belief enough to accept that.

Luckily I was often distracted by how amazing Luca was with Nora and that helped to shift that little annoyance and had me hooked once again into the story. I struggled to put it down because I was enjoying it so much and did accidentally stay up very late one night just to fit in some more of the story.

Love at First Sight is just such a joyful book, it made me feel warm and happy, it has some wonderful characters and a gorgeous setting and is well worth a read.

Nora is unlucky in love but never loses sight of finding the perfect partner, so when a handsome stranger comes to her rescue she feels an immediate connection and is determined to give fate a bit of a helping hand. Gabe is everything Nora wants in a boyfriend and when he whisks her away to Sicily to meet his family she feels like her life is going in the right direction. However, Nora soon discovers that there are flaws in her relationship and has some difficult decisions to make before she can truly be happy.

I enjoyed the way the story developed, particularly the snippets from a series of letters written by Nora's mother when she too was young and in love for the first time. It's the perfect summer escapism as not only do we get an unashamedly romantic story but we also get to spend time on the beautiful island of Sicily, meeting and making friends with Gabe's wonderful family and spending time in the hot Sicilian sunshine in a gorgeous wine-growing region. Love at First Sight is about finding what is important in life, of learning how to take a chance on what is being offered and of opening your heart to love when the right person comes along. It's a perfect read on the beach sort of story, rich in detail, high on romance, and a heartwarming ending, what's not to like?

When Nora is rescued by a stranger, she engineers a meeting with him and soon they are dating, but how is his brother Luca connected to all of this. A great setting once she is visiting his family. A great summer read.

Thank you, NetGalley, for the ARC of Love at First Sight by Jessica Gilmore. Love at First Sight is a delightful book about self-discovery, love, fate, and found family. Nora has sworn off love; she knows that she's been trying too hard and wants fate to do its job. Fate steps in 30 minutes later in the form of a shoe stuck in a storm grate and a handsome stranger named Gabe, ready to save the day.

After a whirlwind romance and the introduction of Gabe's family, Nora finds herself wondering if fate got it wrong after Gabe has to leave on a business trip and she finds herself falling for his brother.

Love at First Sight is perfect for fans of Mamma Mia, While You Were Sleeping, and The Holiday. It captures the essence of unexpected romance and the magic of finding love when you least expect it. This book is a delightful read that will leave you believing in the power of fate and the beauty of found family.

I'm reviewing this via NetGalley, as part of a tour with Rachel's Random Resources.

On first impressions, I felt the protagonist, Nora, was a fun character, and I found her a little bit relatable. Some of the exchanges at the start of the book made me giggle. Reading on, I found there were some other characters that I warmed to as well, and I was curious about how some of them may contribute to the rest of the story.

This was a delightful romantic read, and I also enjoyed the escape that it provided, with its Italian setting. I found it fun to read, and a little bit surprising, with some sultry characters. If you are a romance reader, this book would be a good choice to chill out with.

Thank you to NetGalley, Rachel's Random Resources, and to the author and publisher, for the opportunity to read and review this.

This is a good escapist novel, a very romantic comedy of errors that makes you wonder who’s the right brother, but it’s also the path to change, happiness, and being her own woman made by Nora.
It starts as a standard rom com but it evolves into a poignant&funny story that bring us around Italy with a main focus on Sicily.
As I’m Italian born and bred I often think the description of Italian families or places like a sort of fairy tale. I liked the description of Gabe’s family, but I think there were some details missing as future MIL or nonnas can be terrifying.
Sicily is experiencing a terrible drought and there’s 40C at the moment and I hope it will be soon back to the lovely place pictured in this novel.
I was hooked since the first chapter and liked the twists and the final part. I liked how Nora went from naif girl who wanted the movie perfect love story to one who was able to identify what really matters. I also loved the subplot about her mother.
A cute, entertaining and moving novel I recommend
Many thanks to Orion and Rachel’s Random Resources for this digital copy, all opinions are mine.

I initially requested this book because I'd seen a review saying it was similar to While You We're Sleeping, an all time favourite rom-come of mine and while there are absolutely similarities, this seemed to miss the cute and quirky feeling I got from the movie. Instead it's filled with repetition and a love triangle that I just wasn't invested in.

Let's start with the positives because there are plenty. Nora herself is a fantastic character, she's someone who has no family left in the world, raised by her young mother and grandparents after her mother got pregnant whilst travelling. She has always wanted that instant, romance film style connection her mother and father had, and she thinks she finds it with Gabe. She just want's somewhere to belong, someone she can start her own family with, so when Gabe's family think she is his fiance there's a part of her that wants to play along, wants it to be true. I empathised with her, loosing all her family at such a young age, but there were moments, decisions she made, that annoyed me a little.

I also loved the side characters, namely Gabe's family and Nora's friends. I loved how supportive they were of Nora, even Gabes family, knowing what he was like. And then there's Luca, the older brother who seems suspicious of Nora from the get go. I enjoyed him as a character, he knows something Nora doesn't, something pretty pivotal to her relationship with Gabe which annoyed me, but you can understand why he made the decision he did, and I loved seeing him help Nora delve into her past, helping her look for the father she never knew. I think one of my favourite parts of the book though was reading the postcards Nora's mother had written. These were included at the start of every chapter and were a mixture of letters to her parents, unsent ones to Nora's father and to Nora herself. These really added an emotional aspect to the story, and gave us a great insight into Nora's life before she lost her family.

Anyone whose seen While You We're Sleeping knows there's one nice, 'good' brother, and one narcissistic, self involved, and that was similarly the case in this, the main difference is that Nora is actually dating him, and I think this is where my dislike comes in because she knew what he was like, was constantly making excuses for him, ignoring her friends so they could do things he wanted her to do. I guess I just didn't enjoy how long it took Nora to admit to herself that Gabe was absolutely not the one for her, instead of just moaning about it and then getting really defensive anytime anyone tried to talk to her about it. There's a twist, one centered around the miscommunication trope, that's pretty obvious from the start of the book, but one the author takes far too long getting too, which is something I greatly dislike in books.

I guess a big part of why I didn't love this book was it was so repetitive. If we learned that Nora didn't know her father, that he and her mother met while they we're travelling, that Nora's grandparents and mother were dead once, we must have read it 50 times. I get that you want us to empathise with her, and I did, but I also found myself skipping huge portions of the book because it just got brought up time and time again. It was almost as if Nora couldn't make a bad decision without it being ok because all her family was dead... brutal I know, but the author almost used it as a scapegoat for any bad decision she made, argument she had etc.

The romance itself was a slow burn, and there were parts of it I loved, but I couldn't quite get over how both brothers knew something Nora didn't and almost actively lied to her about it? It's heavy on the miscommunication trope, which isn't really my jam either. But all that being said, I did like Luca, I liked his blossoming romance with Nora, seeing the difference in how he treated her compared to Gabe. All in all, I liked this book, but I didn't love it. It was a little longer than it needed to be, and too overly repetitive for me to truly get invested, but the characters, as well as the little letters from Nora's mum kept me invested enough to not give up.

The perfect summer read. I absolutely loved this book from start to finish. The characters where brilliant. A great story and very easy to read. I read this with a smile on my face whilst out in the sun.

The plot kind of reminded me of the movie, While You Were Sleeping!

Nora is trying to find the love of her life, just like her mom and grandparents did. Through a little Googling/cyber stalking, she manufactures a meet up with the guy who saved her from an accident one rainy night, for a re-meet cute. They embark on a whirlwind romance that ends up with Nora going to Sicily to meet his family. In Sicily, she ends up meeting his big and kind family, specifically his brother Luca, with whom she realizes that she may have a better connection with.

I liked Nora a lot. After the deaths of her mom and grandparents, she is lonely and wants to be with her person. Through the book, she slowly finds herself, her chosen and missing family, and true love. She realizes that it's ok to be alone, but that she's truly never lonely. Luca is initially very suspicious towards her and her relationship with Gabe. Luca and Nora's relationship is a definite slow burn. I really liked the ending, where Nora grows into herself and becomes more self-confident.

Thank you to NetGalley and Orion Publishing Group for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Unexpected love, holiday romance, slow burn. The cutest little book. If you’re looking for something real and engaging to read over the summer, I’d recommend picking this up