I have to be honest, this book was way more than I anticipated.

the characters were complex, the story was so real and the way that feelings and the growth of the fmc was delivered was just amazing. Lately a lot of books are very surface level, the story is predictable and just leaves you feeling meh.

this story was, instead, a rollercoaster of emotions, it gave me hope that even if things don't work out the way we expect them to, they can still resolve themselves and be even better than our own limited expectations. The love story was off the charts.

To the author, thanks for sharing your story, Nicole's story and the story of a lot of women in the most authentic way.

I hope one day I can become a mother, in whichever way the universe has decided and be able to take it and cherish it.

PS: if the universe can also send me my own Logan, I would not complain, not one bit.

*Thank you netgalley, publisher and author for giving me this ARC

My heart hurt for Nicole throughout after seemingly one bad thing after another happened to her. Nicole’s thoughts, feelings and actions hit me square in my heart, even as delicately as the author was, the pain came through honestly and so true to life. To my life in particular. I’m old so I’ve had years to heal, but if pregnancy loss and/or inability to carry are a trigger for you, may want to hold off until you’ve healed. The friendships and the new relationship she embarks on had funny dialogue, loved the D&D game she plays with him and his friends. The pace was perfect for me, whipped though this very quickly. And being from the South Bay (of Los Angeles) I loved the references to cities in my hometown. Pier Ave got a shout out!

Thanks to NetGalley for allowing me to read an Arc of The Best Worst Thing for my honest opinion. Recommend!!

This book wrecked me in the best way possible. If you want a well-written romance novel that tackles tough issues, don’t miss The Best Worst Thing by Lauren Okie.

Nicole has been through hell and back to achieve her dream of becoming a mom. The worst, and best, things happen—she discovers her husband has cheated on her and learns her surrogate is pregnant with their baby. As her marriage falls apart, she falls in love with Logan. But will the circumstances of her life get in the way?

Read this book if you like:
🩵 Workplace romance
🩵 Found family
🩵 Banter

I’m endlessly thankful to Avon and Harper Voyager, as well as NetGalley, for the eARC of The Best Worst Thing. I’m calling it now: This is the best book I’ll read in 2025.

A contemporary romance that tackles difficult topics, The Best Worst Thing is about Nicole, who has a seemingly perfect life. A handsome, successful husband, a popular podcast about their fertility journey, and endless resources to invest into IVF and surrogacy. She tells herself that she doesn't miss her career and her former coworkers, like her work bestie Logan. But when she walks in on her husband with another woman, her world crumbles.

Second Chance romance (with dual timelines)
Infidelity
Fertility Issues
Workplace romance
The One that Got Away
Some spice
Quarrels with exclamation points!
Supportive friends

At times I was not on board with Nicole's choices, I liked that the book handled infidelity in a mature way with lots of different viewpoints - what should Nicole do? She is in a difficult situation and her choice is not as easy as it may seem. Logan is fully in love with her, and he is one of those "book boyfriends" who completely ruins the real world male population for you.

She loves reading and he actually reads her favorite books. Only my mom does that! Boys would never! But Logan does. The epilogue is very sweet and endearing.

Great for fans of Elissa Sussman and Abby Jimenez

Thanks to NetGalley and Avon and Harper Voyager for the ARC. Book to be published October 14, 2025.

I loved this book! I am a huge fan of stories that deal with tough topics but also have humor and romance, so this ticked a lot of boxes for me. Nicole and Logan had so many obstacles in front of them, I wasn't sure how it would all wrap up, but it resolved perfectly.

such a great and enjoyable book! I love how it makes you notice that things may seem perfect from the outside looking in, but once you look inside, there is a facade being out up. I like that. It was well written and it kept me entertained!!

Thank you to NetGalley, to the author, and to the publisher for this complimentary ARC in exchange for my honest review!!!

I saw that Jessica Joyce was reading this book, one of my favorite authors, and thought the premise was interesting and different. I wish I had shared the same wonderful experience as other reviewers had while reading, as I was so excited to receive this e-ARC, but I just had a fine experience. The book is written in 3rd person, and there are tons of chapters, but they're short, which I loved and appreciated; it was easy to keep saying, "One more chapter," but similar to another reviewer, I felt like the chapters needed more depth. I LOVED Nicole and Logan's banter; they're both so funny! Logan was funny, quirky, charming, and sweet; he really had golden retriever energy! I liked the flashbacks, but they jump right into Nicole and Logan already having a connection, being work friends/crushing on each other. I would've enjoyed it more if we saw how they became friends, how Logan's feelings shifted from platonic to romantic towards Nicole, and how Nicole dealt with her developing romantic feelings towards Logan despite being with Gabe. Nicole and Logan shared some adorable moments in the flashbacks, such as lingering glances and gentle touches. However, I didn't feel a strong connection to their romance. It was clear from the beginning of the flashbacks that they liked each other, so there was no real build-up to their connection. Like another reviewer, I wish there was more showing of Nicole and Logan's strong connection instead of telling readers they had this connection. The book would benefit from showing the establishment of Nicole and Logan's connection/romance rather than telling and showing them already having a romantic connection from the start.

Thank you to Avon and Harper Voyager & Netgalley for the e-ARC!

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Best Worst Thing by Lauren Okie
Pub Date: October 14, 2025
Trigger Warnings: Miscarriage, surrogacy, infidelity, divorce

Review:
5 stars. No notes. I devoured this book. Lauren Okie’s debut is a raw, heart-wrenching, beautifully layered exploration of love, grief, betrayal, and unexpected second chances. It’s angsty in the best way, full of grown-up feelings, and feels like getting caught in a summer storm—messy, emotional, but oddly healing.

Nicole and Gabe have been together for ten years, and it looks like they have the perfect marriage, except they haven't been able to have children. Just when they’re hoping for a fresh start via surrogacy, Nicole discovers Gabe has been unfaithful. Enter: Logan—her old work crush and the literal embodiment of a cinnamon roll. One drunken night leads to something deeper, funnier, and full of banter that sizzles.

Nicole’s “best worst summer” is a rollercoaster of emotions as she navigates heartbreak, impending motherhood, and the chance to build something real with Logan while learning to be true to herself.

I laughed, cried, and wanted to give Logan the Book Boyfriend of the Year award. He’s nerdy, loyal, awkward in the best way, and you will be completely smitten. Nicole’s journey felt so authentic, and I appreciated the way her grief, uncertainty, and resilience were portrayed.

This book is for anyone who’s had to rebuild their life after everything falls apart—and finds something even better in the process.

Read if you like:
💔 Right person, wrong time
🍼 Surrogacy and infertility rep
💕 Book boyfriends who ruin you for real men
👯‍♀️ Strong female friendships
🎢 Emotional rollercoasters
✨ Hope after heartbreak

Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

I knew this book would wreck me. Do I think this a book everyone should read? Yes. Do I think it’s a book everyone can read? Maybe not, depending on your current circumstances. I’m going to review this in two parts.

Part one - I loved this book. I loved the characters, I loved the raw emotions, I loved the banter, I loved the conclusion, I loved the author’s note. I. Just. Loved. It. Our female lead is going through A LOT and while sometimes the decisions she makes seem a bit extreme, she’s trying to deal with years of issues all at once and make everything make sense. Nicole and Logan have the most fun banter I’ve read in a long time. The dual timeline in this one is perfection. The emotional baggage is written so well and never tipped to the unrealistic side. As I said, I loved it.

Part two - if you are part of the infertility/ivf/pregnancy loss community, be gentle with yourself. I will say that this book made me feel seen. That the minute Nicole discussed treatment and the emotional toll, I could immediately tell that this author had a personal stake in this. It felt like someone took my struggles and got them on paper. These hardships are written with care, not dragged out, but also so so so real. If you are at a place where you can read about these topics and not harm your mental health, it is by far worth the read. Pregnancy loss is also talked about and again, the way it’s written made feel like my experience was written into a book. It was not in great detail but the emotion of it was done perfectly. If I read this closer to the time of my miscarriage, I don’t know if I would have been okay. So again, think of yourself and if you are in a place to read about these topics.

All the stars.

Thank you Avon for this amazing arc. And thank you Lauren for writing this story.

The Best Worst Thing follows Nicole, a married woman whose world unravels when she learns she’ll never be able to carry a child. Heartbroken, she turns to surrogacy, but her emotionally unavailable husband, Gabe, offers little support. Nicole, once full of promise, now finds herself without a job, and even her podcast—centered around her fertility struggles—is losing steam.

Her life takes another unexpected turn when she discovers Gabe is cheating on her with the dog walker. In the wake of this betrayal, and in a moment of raw vulnerability, she reconnects with Logan—an old coworker who was always kind, funny, and quietly in awe of her. Logan is the kind of character who makes you root for second chances.

The novel does a great job of weaving together themes of loss, identity, betrayal, and new beginnings. I appreciated the emotional honesty, especially in Nicole and Logan’s journey toward healing and rediscovery. That said, I found Nicole’s constant inner turmoil and back-and-forth decision-making a bit much at times—it made the story feel a little drawn out.

Still, the connection between Nicole and Logan felt genuine and satisfying. Their relationship brought a hopeful and heartfelt layer to the story that made it worth the read.

This book deserves all the stars in the sky.

I finished it at 1am, rocking my toddler back to sleep for the millionth time, holding my breath so I wouldn’t start actively sobbing, and somehow it was the perfect way to say goodbye to Nicole and Logan. The Best Worst Thing was exquisite—heart-wrenching, deeply personal, and stunningly written. Every word hit with exacting precision, and by the end, I felt completely wrung out. I loved every second.

Nicole’s story hit so hard. The journey to motherhood is complicated as hell. We build up these expectations, and when things don’t go as planned (or even when they do), it rocks you to your very core. And yet, life just keeps moving forward. Watching Nicole navigate infertility, betrayal, and the grief of it all was rough, I’m not gonna lie. There was no easy resolution. She messed up a lot. She shut people out. Untangling her life was slow, extremely messy work. But in the end, her arc was one of the most healing and life-affirming I’ve ever read.

And then there was Logan—the true embodiment (CAD model, if you will) of steady, unconditional, golden retriever-level love. The kind of person who truly sees someone, even when they can’t see themselves. Their history made every interaction crackle with unspoken feelings, and the flashbacks only made the longing hit harder. Their dynamic was this perfect mix of humor, inside jokes, playful banter, deep understanding, and years of complicated emotions that made their connection feel inevitable.

Here’s where I’m going to get nerdy for a quick sec. Lauren Okie’s writing was masterful. The pacing, the sentence structure, the way she wove rhythm into her prose—it was truly lyrical. Short, clipped sentences landed like gut punches. Long, meandering ones built emotion so intensely that I occasionally had to pause and simply stare at a wall while I processed. The craftsmanship of Lauren's truly blew my mind, elevating an already incredible story into something actually unforgettable. And then, just when I thought it couldn’t get better, the epilogue delivered the most satisfying, quietly perfect ending.

By the time I reached the acknowledgments, I had nothing but awe for what Lauren Okie accomplished with this debut. Her voice is singular, her storytelling feels effortless, and her ability to translate grief, love, and healing onto the page is unlike anything I’ve read before. This wasn’t just one of my favorite books of the year—it’s one of the best I’ve ever read. I want a million more.

This book comes with an undoubted trigger warning for infertility and loss; there are many tears to be shed throughout this novel.

This book will repeatedly rip your heart out and then put it right back again. It’s messy, exciting, and filled with love.

Exploding with love.

The goofy, childish love. The serious love. The hard to face love. The passionate, perfect love.

An added side note: I love the authors writing style. As a mom who struggled to get back into reading postpartum, the chapters are short and sweet. It makes it easy to pick up for a few minutes and put it back down, and easy to keep dying “just one more chapter.”

The Best Worst Thing is a heartfelt, honest story about grief and healing. The characters felt real, and while some parts wrapped up a bit too neatly, the emotional moments landed beautifully. A quick, meaningful read that’s well worth your time.

This was a wonderfully written debut novel by Lauren Okie surrounding one woman’s infertility struggle.
Nicole and Gabe have been going through years of infertility, and are on their last attempt at a gestational pregnancy with a surrogate. Only for Nicole to come home one day from a trip to discover her husband having an affair with their dog walker. In her haze of her marriage blowing apart, she comes into contact with Logan, an old coworker who always held a torch for Nicole.

I learned so much and felt the emotional turmoil of this novel in my bones. The ache of her fertility struggle; the way that Nicole realizes that she doesn’t know who she was without her husband; who she was outside of being Gabe’s wife. I sometimes have issue with mutiple flashbacks in books, but it absolutely worked for this novel to have the full backstory.

Would recommend this novel!

Thank you to Avon and Harper Voyager & Netgalley for the ARC of this novel; all opinions are my own.

Short review?
For the love of all things good and holy in this world, it is my civic duty to tell you to read this immediately because it is soul alteringly beautiful and good and funny and mind numbingly sweet.

Long review?
I love this book so much my stomach hurts thinking about it. I am head over heels in love with Logan. I love everything about him- the yearning, the respect, the intelligence, the ADHD, the peanut butter jars. Logan is everything good and pure and loves Nicole in such a healthy and incredible way. We all deserve to be loved by a Logan, and we all have been Nicole when she wasn’t ready to accept that kind of love because we felt we didn’t deserve it.

And Nicole!!! My sweet, sweet, Nicole. I love this woman. I knew immediately that the author had put a part of herself into this story when the pain of infertility and trauma on the page was such an accurate representation of my own trauma. Nicole’s opinion of being broken and not good enough could have been pulled from my own brain. I KNOW her because I WAS her. I loved seeing her shine with confidence in ways that surprised me because it reminded me that I, too, can be confident. I, too, am more than the cards life has dealt me. I, too, can love big and deserve to be loved even bigger.

I am going to scream into the void about this release for years to come. This story feels tattooed onto my heart. If Nicole was 3D printed just for Logan, The Best Worst Thing feels like it is being printed just for me.

Lauren, thank you for writing this. Thank you for sharing yourself within these pages and for giving these characters life and setting them free to change hearts. And to Avon and Harper Collins- thank you for giving this broken but healing girl a chance to read this early because wow. WOW! What a gift.

Thank you to Netgalley, the publishers, and the author for an advanced copy of this book! This was a book that I had seen multiple times on instagram and I was so excited to read it! You know when you start to read a book and from the first few pages that you are going to absolutely love this book and will spend every waking moments thinking about it? That was me for this book, I could not get enough. The banter between Logan and Nicole was so entertaining, as well as all of Logan’s stream of consciousness thoughts. I felt the pacing of this book moved the story along well, without dwelling too long in one time period. The author does a good job of redeeming some of the worst behaved characters in the book, and I appreciated how it all came together in the end.

This book does deal with some heavy topics such as infertility and infidelity but it was written very well. I will be recommending this book to anyone who will listen for a very long time!

I was lucky enough to receive an e-arc of The Best Worst Thing on NetGalley and I was BLOWN AWAY. Not only does Lauren Okie deliver a compelling and incredible love story (the years and years of YEARNING!) via her own version of Jim & Pam's love story from The Office, but she dives into the realities of infertility and all of the ways it can make or break a relationship in a way that feels natural and not heavy (aka so, so well done). As someone who suffered in the infertility trenches for a long time, I related so much with Nicole's story and the feelings she felt. I have whole chunks of the book highlighted and I've preordered it so I can reread when it comes out in October (and so I can have a physical copy sitting on my shelves bc that cover is beautiful!)... I'll probably be shouting about it until then.

For years all Nicole has ever wanted was to have a baby with her husband Gabe. She even started a podcast to document their journey. When she finds out he's cheated she plans to end the marriage and ends up in the doorstep of her old boss. A strange pull she's had to him for years has her feeling like her old self. When she finds out the transfer worked and their surrogate is finally pregnant she realizes she has choices to make and her dream of being a mom will finally come true.

I was incredibly proud of Nicole's character. She's strong and funny and so sure of herself for the most part. I loved that she asked the hard questions and didn't just give in because she thought life would be easy and stick out with her family.

I loved Nicole and Logan's relationship. Logan was such a good guy and those are hard to find in books. Their relationship was fun and laid back but also just so emotional that it felt so real.

I already recommended this book to a friend and can't wait to tell more about it!

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for this ARC. I saw an Instagram story about this book and immediately ran to NetGalley. After finishing chapter one, I knew that this would be a five star book. The banter between Nicole and Logan was fantastic and I wanted another 300 pages of it. The characters felt so raw and real and I could not put this down. As someone also struggled with infertility, I related so much to Nicole. The author clearly had experience with the topic based on how she tackled many aspects of infertility. I would probably classify this as second chance romance, which is my favorite trope. I was rooting for these characters from the very beginning.

I will be buying this one when it comes out in October for a re-read. I can’t wait for more people to read this so I can talk about it with someone!!!!

Thank you to NetGalley, the publishers and author for an advanced copy of this book,
The Best Worst Thing by Lauren Okie.
I absolutely devoured this book. I read it one sitting and haven’t stopped thinking about it since. I loved Logan! He was so amazing to Nicole. I loved the banter between him and them. I don’t love a 3rd act breakup but I do understand it in this case. Nicole had so much going on, she definitely should have figured some of it out prior to pursing Logan. She frustrated me at times but I also liked how she was a realistic character. Loved the ending and epilogue.
4.5⭐️