Too Soon for Adios started off as a family drama and over time turns into a romance novel AND I enjoyed both approaches. The book immediately got my attention and it was an entertaining one day beach read. I enjoyed Gabby's relationships whether with her birth father, her love interest, or the aunties. It was also fun to visit the foods and community of a a Mexican family. All in all a good read and recommended!

This book was so good and got my attention as soon as I read the first page. Unfortunately Gabby is part of the many people who didn’t grow up with a father. And he comes to her at her mothers funeral. Gabby grows in this book as she learns how to navigate grief.
Big Chicas Don’t Cry and now this book. Annette Chavez Macias is becoming one of my favorite Mexican American Authors ♥️♥️♥️ Thank you NetGalley for this arc

Am emotional read, this was impossible to put down

I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Meeting her biological father at her mother's funeral, Gabby is stunned. Knowing nothing about him, she is shocked when he offers to give her a house. Gabby needs the money so she offers to fix up the house with a plan to sell it after. But when she moves in and gets to know some of the locals - one man, in particular, it seems leaving might be harder than she thought.

So, I liked this book. I especially liked hearing about all the Mexican food. I feel like we are quite deprived here when it comes to Mexican cuisine - I don't even know of a Mexican restaurant that we have here! This is my first book by this author and I'd definitely be keen to read more.

Absolutely loved every minute of this book! Gabby was so relatable for me, and I felt an instant connection with her. I loved seeing her journey to healing and absolutely cried with her. A beautiful story about grief and love!

This was a beautiful story of grief, self discovery, and healing. I loved seeing Gabby’s journey and the role food played in learning her family history.

Mole poblano is one of my favorite foods in the world and seeing them make mole and talking about how it’s a labor of love truly warmed my heart!

Thank you to NetGalley for my earc and to the author for my physical arc.

Finding yourself, where you belong and what you deserve sometimes means redefining everything your thought you knew

Gabby is at her mothers funeral after a long battle with cancer, and as she is saying her final goodbyes, she meets a man claiming to be her biological father. The only thing she knows about him is he abandoned her and her mother when she was a baby and never came back, her aunts enlighten her it is more complicated than that but to stay away anyways. He offers her the opportunity to fix up and sell his grandmothers house no strings attached, and she has a lot of debt and bills to pay so she takes him up on his offer. She is determined to get to the small town of Sonrisa in New Mexico, get the house fixed and sold asap and return back to her life in LA. What she doesn't expect is to find everything she has been hoping for in this small town.

This was a nice read and I really enjoyed the small town setting, and the culture weaved throughout the novel. The characters felt too one dimensional, and this book would have benefited from being longer and having more meat to it. The author did a lot of telling instead on showing. Everything felt rushed nothing felt fully fleshed out.

I got this ARC a couple days before my brother passed & I couldn’t pick it up knowing this book dealt with grief & now 5 months later I read it and couldn’t help but relate to that aspect of the book. It helps reading about how others deal with it and because I know that this is woman’s fiction, I didn’t expect romance! But it made me love it even more. The couples banter and the way he took care of her even though she could do it herself was the cutest. So much giddiness! I loved the dad aspect as well & even though there was some drama, which was super entertaining, I loved how she handled that. Also supper proud of her accomplishments in the end of the book!! This story made me cry, laugh and squeal and learn some things, that’s all I look for in a book!

a very emotional read, love the writing. the storytelling is brilliant, the characters are all well balanced.

Too Soon For Adiós by Annette Chavez Macias follows Gabby Medina, a young woman who meets her biological father at her mother's funeral. After decades of absence, he shows up with an offer that could potentially change her life.

This book has themes of grief, loss of purpose, and family.
All in all, I highly recommend this book, which, although it is in the romance genre, I also consider it a multi generational story. Be prepared to feel the emotions and just go through a beautiful journey of finding family where one least expects it.

Reviews by the Wicked Reads Review Team

Ruthie – ☆☆☆
This is the first book I have read by this author, and I would look out for more in the future. It deals with cultural issues far from my own and I really enjoyed the history, the food, and the locale in the story. I did find that, for me, it could have done with being tightened up a bit editorially, as some of the threads did not really seem consistent. I was, however, engaged enough in the story to let such things pass, without too much frustration. The story came from a good place, and so I read it in that mindset.

The idea that a young woman could be saddled with so much debt by her semi-estranged dead mother was not a good one, and how it left Gabby very conflicted was well written. It also gave her the opportunity to take a chance on resolving that by taking up the offer from her previously absent father. The links with food, history, and the importance of family gave the book a chance to shine a light on better parts of her past. and obviously the hero of the story proves to be a man to trust.

A clever take on a love story – one romantic, but also one which heals a damaged past.

TW: Cancer, loss of a loved one, sexual assault, physical abuse

Gaby Medina’s mother has just lost her battle with cancer. At her funeral, a man named Raul approaches Gaby revealing himself to be her biological father and that he would like to give her the house he inherited from his grandmother to fix up and sell and she could keep the earnings. Gaby, swept into a whirlwind of emotions, initially refuses, angry that after all these years of abandonment Raul chooses now to step into her life. After an incident at work leaving her with no job and bills to pay, she reluctantly agrees to help Raul and moves into the house in the small town of Sonrisa, New Mexico. When she arrives, she hires a contractor who coincidentally also happens to be the mayor, and they both get to work fixing up the home to be market ready. The longer Gaby stays in Sonrisa, the longer she learns about her Mexican roots and establishes new connections that may be a little tricky to untangle once the house is finished and sold.


This was a beautiful and emotional story about a woman’s journey as she travels to a small town where she begins to learn more about the father that left her, new connections to open up her guarded heart and a rich culture of food and history she has never truly known. I did enjoy our MC Gaby, she was one STUBBORN character and at times I felt myself getting so frustrated with her but I admired her strength and resilience throughout the story. I do wish the story focused a little more on Gaby and Raul’s father/daughter relationship, it was definitely more so focused on the romance. I also do wish we could have seen some repercussions or follow through with Chef Dean (angry) would have loved seeing that man get every single consequence he deserved. But overall, I really enjoyed the Mexican culture in this story: from the food, to the history of the town and the soldaderas, everything was beautifully written and articulated throughout the book. Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for an eARC of this novel in exchange for my honest review.

The story of Gabby, losing her mother and her job, meeting her father for the first time. lots of life changes, A great read, emotional at times, as she finds out more about the family she never knew and makes new friends along the way.
Looking forward to more books from this author.

“My grandma used to say that the universe worked in mysterious ways. It was the only explanation I could come up with for how I’d ended up becoming a chef just like the biological father I never knew. Or how I ended up eating tacos in his restaurant almost thirty years after I was born.”

Genre: General Fiction, Romance
Actual Rating: 5 stars
Spicy Meter: 1 fire emoji
Content Warnings: Discusses parental and child death. Describes a sexual assault and physical abuse. Contains some sexual innuendos, but it’s closed doors.

“Too Soon For Adiós” follows Gabby Medina, an ex-sous-chef, as she learns to live after her mother’s death. She was left without her adopted father at a young age and now loses her mother at 29—she is all alone. That is, until a stranger introduces himself as her biological dad at her mother’s funeral. She wants nothing to do with him, for obvious reasons. But when things take a turn for the even-worse, she wants to leave the only place she’s called home and is driven to Sonrisa, New Mexico, her bio-father’s small hometown, where she’ll meet new people and grow into new places.

Do not be bamboozled by the cute cover: this book follows a heartbreaking story, and it touches on very difficult topics like terminal illness, serious debt brought on by someone else, sexual assault, domestic violence, and so much multigenerational trauma.

The romance portion of this book is closed doors, but gosh, the sexual tension between them is so palpable that although their love was slow to burn, it was 100% worth the 65% wait.

I think these are my favorite types of books—both general fiction and romance sprinkled together. It’s as close to real life as fiction gets. I loved the small town setting, I loved almost every character, I loved watching Gabby grow and learn that being soft doesn’t have to mean being weak.

I cannot recommend this novel enough. Immerse yourself in this story if you’ve enjoyed books like “Georgie, All Along” by Kate Clayborn or “Commonwealth” by Ann Patchett, where life is woven as the complicated thing it can be.

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ARC provided by NetGalley and Montlake in exchange for an honest review.

Publication Date: March 21, 2023

“Mijita, that’s what love is, (…) losing yourself in someone else.”

At some point the author mentioned Hallmark movies and that is exactly where my mind stayed for the rest of the book. It has practically all the trademarks of a Hallmark movie: troubled woman getting away from the big city for some reason or another, small town, attractive handyman who makes a terrible first impression (albeit this one wears a baseball hat instead of flannel), characters "finding" themselves, falling in love, happily ever after's for all involved.
But even with its cookie cutter dynamic it's still its own story with a much deeper emotional level that will take readers on a journey of grieving, healing and finding a new path.

I was not prepared to cry but this novel was heartfelt and beautifully written. Gabby had a full character arc and what I really appreciated is that even by the end her grief of her mother was still present it just looked different. In the authors note she wrote grief is just love without somewhere to go. And I think we get to read what love and obligation can impact the grieving process.

Too Soon for Adiós is a book about new beginnings, about mourning, but about going ahead. I loved the characters, how the author wrote about different culture, Gabby is an interesting girl, she's not the "perfect" size and I love this, and I love her confidence.

Wow I loved this! Gabby’s journey was so fun to read about and the ending was great. I do wish the chef from the beginning had seen some consequences for his actions though. That would be my one complaint. I loved the dynamic between the characters and the setting sounded beautiful. I wish Sonrisa was real so I could move there! I will definitely be checking out other books by this author.

I received an advance copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

The story was brutal emotional, heartwarming and loving overall. It’s hard to find your way in life when so many obstacles are thrown out in your way. And I felt so much empathy for Gabby . From the passing of her mother, to her assault, and the debts , also having to relocate and even make pace with the missing father . That’s a lot for a young woman to deal with but I loved how reliable and strong she was. The author has created a perfectly imperfect character that I loved so much. And Diego was the reward that I was looking forward to for her.

Absolutely loved every moment of reading this. The mix of loss, finding family and a sense of place, finding love. It was all done perfectly to be honest. Thoroughly enjoyed my time with these characters, I'd read another book by the author in a heartbeat.