Gracie Cooper is a fierce businesswoman. She is running the family champagne store, Bubbles and More, and she’s been the one to move the Manhattan store into a new, modern era. She adds extras like cute cocktail napkins and the fancier bags that customers can carry home, signifying that they’re transporting something extraordinary. And she added the art corner, filled with watercolors of champagnes, wines, and cocktails in bright colors that draw your eye.

Gracie spends her days at the store with her fiery stepmother May and prickly wine expert Robyn, trying to find ways to increase sales. Her brother and sister are co-owners but not as involved in the day-to-day work of running the store. When their father died, it was expected that Gracie would be the one to take it over, and she would do anything for her family.

But she also needs something for herself.

While she doesn’t have a relationship of her own, she does have a Mystery Man, a man she met on a dating app where there are no photos. The idea is that couples get to know each other without knowing what the other looks like, and Gracie has struck up a friendship with a man calling himself Sir. Well, maybe it’s more than a friendship. But it’s still less than a relationship, because he told her right off that he was dating someone. But they kept talking anyway, and Gracie finds herself reaching for her phone often to see what he has to say.

The other thing she does for herself? The art corner. She has loved painting since she was a kid, and she took this opportunity to put her own paintings in the store.

And while they have a lease that will guarantee their location for many more years, the landlord is still trying to buy her out. Sebastian Andrews, with his ice blue eyes and cold heart, is trying to put them out of business just so he can build yet another high-rise in Manhattan. But Gracie isn’t having it. She promised herself that she would keep the store going when her father died, and she is doing everything she can to keep them moving forward.

Except that it’s not working. And Gracie is faced with a choice: to stay open, barely keeping their heads above water, or sell out to Sebastian. And then he actually shows up in her store, to talk to her face to face. And she realizes that maybe he’s not so cold-hearted. And those blue eyes can maybe melt her. And while Sir is great to talk to text with on her phone, Sebastian isn’t too bad to talk to in person.

Gracie has spent her whole life dreaming about her fairy tale ending, but she’s going to have to deal with her real-life problems before she can hope to find her happily ever after.

Lauren Layne’s To Sir, with Love is a modern retelling of the friends-to-enemy love story that was told with love letters in Shop Around the Corner or through dial-up internet AOL in You’ve Got Mail. Using the dating app is a fresh telling of this charming story, but it’s Layne’s characters that really add the flavor and texture to this bubbly love story.

In her author’s note, Layne says that she wanted to tell this story for a long time but it took her some time to figure out how to do it. I’m glad she waited with this one, because the story she’s brought us is almost perfect. It’s smart and funny, perfectly balanced, utterly charming, and nothing but fun. If you’re missing those great Nora Ephron rom coms in the theaters, then just pop some popcorn, pour some wine (or something bubbly), and curl up with To Sir, with Love. You’ll be transported back to the first time you saw You’ve Got Mail, and you’ll find yourself falling in love with falling in love all over again.

Egalleys for To Sir, with Love were provided by Gallery Books through NetGalley, with many thanks.

I laughed. I cried. I swooned. This was adorable.

This was the perfect You’ve got Mail retelling. I enjoyed it so much.

There was something revealed about (sir) Sebastian in the first few pages of the book that almost made me stop reading because that kind of thing usually really annoys me but I’m really glad I kept reading and it turned out to not be much of an issue.

I think this book could really have benefited from having Sebastians POV as it’s told completely from Gracies POV and I feel like I wanted to know more about him and what was going through his head and I would have liked more of the interactions between sir and lady.

I loved that this wasn’t all about the romance, but it was also about Gracie finding herself and living her life for only her and not others.

I would love to see a story about Keva and her boss, Grady.

Rating 4.5/5

This book is a complete GEM. You’ve Got Mail is actually my go-to/favorite rom-com of all time. If it is on, I am watching it so when I read the description of this book, I knew I had to check it out. I love books set in NYC, I love the concept of two people falling in love twice, and I also love when characters feel realistic to me. I think this book had all of that. I liked the chemistry between the two main characters and I appreciated the growth of various relationships throughout the book. Nothing overall to critique. If you are looking for a light book that will fill you with warm and fuzzies, then this is the read for you!

To all my Nora Ephron fans, To Sir, With Love is for you. Lauren Layne’s new rom-com is a love letter homage to my favorite enemies-to-lovers movie, You’ve Got Mail.

Confession the Meg Ryan-Tom Hanks brilliance that is You’ve Got Mail is in my top favorite movies of all time so I was both the target audience and hyper aware of the plot and tropes Layne was playing with. And she did an amazing job. I loved her adaptations and story building for Gracie and Sebastian (aka Kathleen and Joe).

In this version Gracie Cooper owns and runs the family’s struggling champagne store and Sebastian Andrews is attempting to buy her out for the prime Manhattan real estate. And of course there’s the anonymous Sir Gracie’s been messaging through a dating app…

I am a general fan of Lauren Layne and her perfectly balanced contemporary romances. She hits everything you want in 300 pages or fewer. I’m talking witty banter, laugh out loud comedic situations, steamy sex scenes, and swoony heros.

To Sir, With Love is no exception. Besides the romance, Gracie contends with broken sibling relationships as she and her brother and sister grew apart after the deaths of their parents.

And on top of that is Gracie’s dream career that she put on hold in order to save the family business. Her confrontation with what she wants from life (which is hella relatable) is at the center of this story.
Reading how Gracie fixes the messes that are her family, friends, career, and duh, love is everything you want from another of Layne’s heartwarming romances.

This book is too precious ☺️

Made me laugh a lot and made me realise how much I miss sarcasm and comedy in romance novels. I loved the dynamic between the leads and wow, the fact that this book is so beautiful and it's just that one kiss at the end than pages of sex as I normally see in novels, I absolutely adore it!!
This was my first book by this author and thank you for the ARC @valentine_pr_ and @netgalley🤩

The writing has such a beautiful flow, the characters grew from the start until the end and so much hope flows out from the book. The enemies to lovers is great because of the fact that even though sometimes the quarrels get rude the leads realise their mistakes.

The book is angst free and I loved it, the characters actually talk about their feelings and that made me so so so happy! The humor was fabulous and had me cackling most of the time and oh how I wish to read more books like these😍

After this gorgeous tale of art, business, champagne, wine, food, love, fairytales, dreams, expectations, mystery men, warmth, family and friends I'm surely going to check out more off this authors books ☺️

I loved the book !!!!!

To Sir, with Love is Lauren Layne's modern-day take on You've Got Mail, and it is a cute story, but it took some time for me to get into it. The first half moved a little too slowly for me with the exception of the messages between Sir and Lady. The messages between them were some of my favorite parts of the book and what kept me turning pages through the first half. That's not to say I didn't like the story. Once things picked up, I enjoyed the banter between Sebastian and Gracie, but I never really felt the chemistry between them that I expected. To me, they were a much better couple as Sir and Lady, and I realize that they were the same people (considering the blurb and inspiration for this book, I don't think I'm giving too much away there) - anyway, I'm not sure how to explain it, but it just felt different. I think I needed more of Sebastian and Sir. Sebastian is a great character, but I really wanted his side of things. I also wanted more of the banter between them. It's rather short-lived and one-sided after that first meeting. What it comes down to is this one was a cute and sweet little romance. I enjoyed it enough to say it was worth the read, but it didn't quite live up to my expectations.

I love a good Lauren Layne book and this one had me smiling from the very beginning. Gracie and her “Sir” were takeoffs of Tom Hank and Meg Ryan in You’ve got Mail but done very 21st century. But as Ms Layne does so well, these characters truly come to life with this story. There are family, great friends, Champagne, and heartaches all rolled into a book that I simply could not put down. I loved it! Sometimes dreams do come true!

Lauren Layne gives You’ve Got Mail an up to date twist with this lighthearted story about a Manhattan champagne shop owner and the man who’s trying to buy her out.

Gracie Cooper had dreams of becoming an artist, but when her father requests that their boutique champagne store be kept in the family after he’s passed, Gracie sets aside her goals to fulfill his dying wish.

She soon realizes the shop isn’t doing well and to make matters worse, the handsome real estate developer Sebastian Andrews is proposing to buy the reminder of the shop’s lease and won’t take no for an answer.

Not wanting to admit defeat to her siblings and feeling conflicted about putting her own dreams on hold she seeks the advice of the nameless, faceless “Sir”, whom she meet via a dating app never even guessing she’s falling for none other than Sebastian whom she perceives as a threat to her father’s legacy in real life.

Although I felt that the romance could have been more developed, this was a cute, frothy and fizzy easy to read story.

This effervescent tale is a delight! A sweet heartwarming romance reminiscent of Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks in You've Got Mail, with conversation taking place through a dating app rather than dial-up email. I loved the characters and the fresh take on a modern fairytale.

I'd like to thank Netgalley and Gallery Books for providing this ARC for an honest review.

This was such a cute read. Perfect for summer. When they compared it to You've Got Mail, they weren't kidding! It gave you the same feels as that movie. It has a kind of sweet enemies to lover trope to it. I loved Sebastian as Sir. Gracie I adored! After her father passed away she took up running his champagne shop, pretty much giving up her own dreams. She was well developed and really likable.

Gracie still looking for the "one", signs up on a dating app and matches with Sir. Sir explains that his friend signed him up as a joke and he has a girlfriend. As they keep talking they have a fun, easy banter and find out they don't want to stop talking.

Gracie's shop is in jeopardy and Sebastian is out to buy it from her as well as other stores on that street. Gracie is not impressed with Sebastian but is still being pulled to him which confuses her.
She's now caught in a love triangle and being pulled in two different directions.

All in all, I really liked this book. It was sweet, predictable, a clean read, and just made you feel good reading it.

I love Lauren Layne and her fun, RomComs set in NYC, but TO SIR WITH LOVE did not work for me. When you re-write a classic story like this you need a fresh take, an element of surprise, something new. Sadly, we don't get anything new in this retelling.

TO SIR WITH LOVE is a cute, frothy, and sweet read. It hits all the marks of its predecessors, most recently You've Got Mail, and the 4-5 film iterations before that. But where Norah Efron added an updated, modern take this story feels like a retelling in a very slightly different setting that doesn't ever try to be new.

The correspondence between the leads, which is meant to be the foundation of their love story, is incredibly sparse. These exchanges are no longer than 3 sentences each and the reader gets to the end thinking, "Wait. They are deeply in love? After exchanging 2 sentence opinions on ice cream vs. sorbet? No chance." This book never takes the secret text exchanges to a deeper place than very surface opinions and it made me wish there had been so much more.

This is a cute beach read, for sure. But it's very slowly paced and gives a single kiss at the end. If you are looking for a sweet, easy read then you might love TO SIR WITH LOVE. But be aware that this is a re-telling of a classic tale and not a re-imagining of it

To Sir, With Love is a modern retelling of You’ve Got Mail. Swapping dial up for a dating app, it tells the timeless story of a couple that falls in love twice - once in person and once in letters/emails/texts/app messages/insert new tech here. As YGM’s #1 fan, I jumped at the chance to read it early and share it with the world. While the book is fantastic, one part in particular fell flat for me and kept it from being a true blue 10/10, 5-star read. It’d still recommend it to ALL You’ve Got Mail and/or rom com fans!

Let’s get the small critique out of the way first - the app messages sent between Lady and Sir lack substance and depth and basically say nothing of import for the vast majority of the book. How did they fall in love through the app with messages like this? There’s absolute nothing to them! For the first third of the book, this really bothered me. By then, I was charmed despite myself because of Sebastian snd Grace’s chemistry in person.

You already know that I LOVE the general storyline of YGM, so I was delighted when the story referenced Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullivan in The Shop Around the Corner (the movie that YGM is based on). I also loved the scenes reminiscent of specific moment in YGM:
- Grace mentions feeling like she’s saying goodbye to her dad all over again (see: Meg Ryan missing her mom when her store is closing)
- Lady (Grace) waxes poetic to Sir (Sebastian) about not having answers to life’s big questions, like “What sort of person do I want to be” and “What sort of of life do I want to have?” (See: Kathleen Kelly’s “goodnight dear void” email to Joe Fox).
- Sebastian wants to “have what she’s having” (okay, this is more Nora Ephron/Meg Ryan and less YGM, but still on theme)

Overall, I loved this book. I sat and hugged my kindle when I finished it and couldn’t get into another book for days after (hello book hangover!). 9/10 would recommend!

Gracie Cooper has a a fairy-tale of what her dream man should be. He’s out there for her, but she just hasn’t met him yet. She signs up for a blind dating app where she (“Lady”) is matched with “Sir.” Sir is only on the app because a friend of his took his phone and set up his profile for him AND he has a girlfriend. They continue to message each other, though.

Gracie owns and runs a champagne shop in NYC. She loves her life, even if it isn’t the life she had originally envisioned for herself. Gracie wanted to go to art school. Her father’s dying wish was for the store to remain in the Cooper family. Since her older sister and younger brother didn’t seem interested, Gracie felt like she had to.

Now, the store is barely surviving. Sebastian Andrews has been after her to sell her remaining lease space to them. She has ignored him so far, but soon there may not be much choice. She considers him her enemy, at first, but as she gets to know him, she realizes he is a good man with good intentions. (AND doesn’t have a girlfriend) But, she’s still messaging and falling for Sir, while falling for Sebastian. What’s her heart to do?

Lauren Layne is one of my favorites. While some of her books can be steamy, this is definitely not one of those. It is a sweet, feel-good, charming romance! I loved Gracie and Sebastian and I loved the secondary characters, too. I especially love how the author made me feel something for Gracie’s sister and her husband’s situation.

Thank you to Gallery Books and NetGalley for an advanced readers copy in exchange for my honest review.

This book was charming enough, but since it's based on a movie I watch multiple times a year, the comparison is inevitable... I think this suffers for only being from the perspective of the heroine. You've Got Mail works so well in part because it's dual perspective and you see both characters' lives, reactions to their relationship, and processing of information they learn about each other. Otherwise, I think she captured the spirit of the story and it was very sweet.

A tender enemies to lovers romcom reminiscent of the movie “You’ve Got Mail.” A beautiful depiction of NYC and a plot that unfolds slowly through movie-like moments and kismet circumstances. Charming and totally bingeable! I read this in two sittings!

Gracie is struggling to keep her father’s champagne shop open and when businessman Sebastian Andrews wants to buy her out, Gracie puts up a fight, leading to lots of run-ins with the sexy and mysterious Sebastian. Little does she know that the man she’s falling for online is her enemy in real life.

This one had a snowball affect on me. The more I read the more I got into the story and I fell completely in love with the setting, the unfolding between the letters and the in person chemistry, and the sweet gestures of these incredibly adorable characters. This romance feels timeless with its sweeping brushes with fate and its hopelessly romantic words. This felt like reading about an old friend and it’s the perfect specimen of a romcom!

I absolutely adored this book! It is my first by Lauren Layne, an author I have been wanting to read for a while. I am so happy I did and can’t wait to read more from her. This enemies to lovers story with some You’ve Got Mail vibes was lovely and heartwarming. Sebastian and Gracie made me smile and believe that dreams can come true.

It’s not often I cry happy tears after finishing a book but.. this book! 😭😭😭😭🤧

I’m in awe/love/other words I can’t come up with in regards to this book. I’d previously read some works by this author but I wasn’t until I started this one that I realized that I had previously read and adored Lauren Layne’s writing.

To Sir, with Love hit it out of the ballpark though. Gracie the female lead was the Disney fairytale loving part of every girl (or boy) whose once dreamed of a happily ever after straight out of a Disney film. So when she signs up for a dating app that seemed to have come out of Jane Austen’s brain her goal is to look for “Mr. Right” (or in this case “Sir”)

Enter Sebastian, the broody business man whose “cold heart” begins to thaw the more time he spends with Gracie while her business is floundering. Since Sebastian would benefit from this directly, Gracie of course feels some type of way about him.

With hilarious dialogue, amazing friendships and not one but two different men who she believes she has to choose between this book has it all and then some. As a reader, I was captivated through the end, near biting my nails off wondering what Gracie would decide.

This book is a MUST READ. To Sir, with Love will easily become one of my favorite books of the year and I cannot wait to see what else this author has in store for her readers.

I really enjoyed this read. The start was a bit slow for me, but redeemed itself quickly once all the pieces started to come together, and I could see where it was leading. The secondary characters were great additions to bring in the dynamics for family, friends, and working relationships. Just an all around feel good, slow build, falling in love journey for Gracie and Sebastián, but not without a few bumps in the road. The bits of humor are always my favorite parts, no matter the scenarios.
A great, clean, summertime beach read that wull leave you with a happy, contented sigh ending!
I received a copy for early reading thru Netgalley. I am giving my own honest thoughts on To Sir, With Love.

4 Stars!
Gracie Cooper is a New Yorker living in Manhattan. She's a positive happy person that loves life and can make the best of any situation. When her father passes away she gives up her art dreams to take over the family business. She's now the owner of a champagne shop across from Central Park. It's her legacy and she's determined to give the shop her all. Then she learns it's in financial trouble, and a big corporation is swarming. She will do anything to keep it afloat, including clashing with the ridiculously handsome Sebastian Andrews.

While struggling with the business Gracie finds a safe place to vent. She begins an online friendship on a dating app with a man she's never met. They anonymously connect and she spends way too much time thinking about him. He makes her smile and quickly becomes important to her. She develops a crush on her pen pal, and has no idea she's already met him in real life and can't stand him. Will her mystery man be the hero of her story or the villain? She wants the kind of romance you see in the movies. The whole fairytale and happily-ever-after. Has she finally found her Prince Charming or is he unattainable?

To Sir, With Love by Lauren Layne is a sweet, romantic, enemies to lovers, rivals romance full of chemistry, humor, and fabulous banter. It's a wonderful heartwarming story about chasing your dreams and following your heart.

4.5 Stars
I loved the characters in this story, I loved the whimsical romantic feel.
It’s a nod to You’ve Got Mail and older movies that inspired that movie, it’s a really enjoyable retelling.
The secondary characters are integral to the fun of the story and they add a lot of the emotional moments. They are all quirky and big personalities.
I loved Gracie, she’s a romantic who’s determined she’ll meet her perfect Prince Charming.
She meets “Sir” on a dating app that’s based on personality, likes/dislikes and not pictures/appearances.
His friends put up the profile, he wasn’t actually in the market. So, they become friends who message and share musings and things they don’t tell their closest friends. They seem to vibe very well, Gracie develops deeper feelings.
Sebastian is trying to buy out Gracie’s family business’ lease. They have the enemies chemistry happening. Lots of banter and heated exchanges between the two.
It’s also a story about choosing your life versus going along with what you think is expected.
It’s extremely slow burn and the romance is a big part of the story, yet it happens quite slowly and late in the story. It’s romantic, not hot and steamy.
That’s usually not my cup of tea, it worked for me in this book.
Gracie is conflicted over feelings for two men that she’s not sure she even has a chance with.
There’s a fun twist.
I adore all the characters.
It was a cute, fun and satisfying read.
The ending was adorable and perfect for this story