Thanks to #Netgalley and Sourcebooks Casablanca for making this book available to me!
Honestly, I have been reading a lot of romance stories for a while but this one is on another level. It is more than banter, more than love, more than even sex (which was steamy), it was a great relationship. A relationship that felt authentic. There was disability representation and the way it was written was just amazing (from my point of view, do check reviews from people living with this disability).
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Without further ado, let’s get into it.
Title: What If You & Me
Author: Roni Loren
Publication date: July 6th, 2021
Publisher: Sourcebooks Casablanca
Review
This book is everything!
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Andi Lockley is a horror fiction writer whose anxiety is making her think that someone is out to get her all the time. After escaping her ex-boyfriend who turned out to be a psychotic killer, she has been scared of forming any new relationships and has you can expect the experience left her traumatized. She is always anxious about a lot of things. As a writer and a true-crime podcaster, she has a lot of deadlines to meet, but her neighbour is constantly moving in his room even late into the night.
So she decides that the best way to get back at him is to play her horror movies as loud as possible. This leads her neighbour, Hill Dawson to come knocking on her door thinking she was being assaulted or worse murdered. Hill is a former firefighter who lost his leg during a reuse mission in a burning building. He is dealing with the pain of the loss of his leg, his job and the woman he thought he was going to spend the rest of his life with. This has left him not bitter but reserved. He has moved away from society and spends his day either with his physical therapist or in his room. He feels that he is no longer the man he used to be.
You would expect this to be a quick love story but it is not. Considering that these two have more emotional garbage than clothes in Christian Boltanski art, it was both heartbreaking and heart mending to see the two of them navigate life and their relationship. It was beautiful to see Andi explore her emotional and sexual boundaries with Hill, they having open and clear discussions about emotional availability and body dysmorphia was just so raw and almost unseen in adult romance fiction.
Andi helps Hills capitalise on his love for cooking, with them making videos online that caught the attention of all her fanbase and new fans because apparently, Hill is delicious looking. But as you can expect, there are also hate comments which were new to Hill. He decides to report this only to find that some haters have been tracking Andi…
Rating
I gave this book 5 out of 5 stars
Thanks for reading.