A steamy romance about two sisters and two best friends. Great story line of finding yourself and your inner voice. Good light reading. Well paced and written.

Where to even start! Literally ran to type this review the moment I finished the novel. This book was such a perfect follow up to It Happened One Summer, Tessa Bailey truly never fails!!

I was so happy to follow along in Hannah and Fox's story. It was set up so well from friends to lovers to slow burn and forced proximity (MY FAVORITE!) . And the spicy scenes, oh my goodness. My favorite thing about this book is the communication. The fact that even when it hurt them, Hannah and Fox communicated!! When push came to shove, they weren't afraid to admit how they felt to each other or others, and the intensity of their feelings. My heart broke for Fox because it can be so difficult to move past people's expectations of you, whether they are good or bad. I was so happy to see Hannah step into her main character moment, and connect her love of music to her relationship with her father. I really enjoyed all of the music references in the story. Kinda want to create a playlist for the re-read!

This was such an amazing story! I've loved Tessa Bailey since reading Fix Her Up and I'm very excited to read her other books.

Thank you to Avon and Harper Voyager for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Hook, Line, and Sinker was the perfect follow-up to It Happened One Summer! You get to dive deeper into not just their story but Fox and Hannah themselves. What you thought you know about Fox, forget it. He is a much deeper person that anyone gives him credit for. As for Hannah, she is a leading lady living like she's a supporting character. You will instantly fall in love with them and not want their story to end. I hope this isn't the end for Westport. I would love to see more!

This is my favorite Tessa Bailey book to date.

Plot Synopsis: After the conclusion of It Happened One Summer, we saw Piper's sister Hannah return to LA to continue her career on movie sets while notorious playboy Fox Thornton stayed in Westport. But while Hannah was in Westport with her sister Hannah and Fox found a connection over Hannah's favorite thing -- music. And While Hannah is away, Fox and Hannah strike up an unlikely relationship, a friendship via text messages. Then Hannah's job sends her back to Westport and needing a place to stay and she ends up crashing in Fox's spare room. Hannah knows Fox is a notorious ladies man, and honestly, she has a long time crush on the file director Sergei (right?), but she can't seem to shake this growing feeling that she wants to get home at the end of the day to see Fox. When the lines between flirtation and friendship start to blur Fox has to learn to face his inner demons so he can show Hannah that he can be all in with just one girl and be more than friends with her but will she wait around for him to do that?

Review: Fox and Hannah are my all time favorite Tessa Bailey couple. Fox just tugged at all of my heart strings. He was fun and loveable and had such a beautiful inner battle about who he thought he was and who he wants to be. Hannah makes him want to be a better man and it is such a beautiful story to watch unfold. We see so much about friendship and parenting and how our words to others can affect how they think about themselves. This is just such a fun and beautiful story that I will be reading over and over again. All the starts for this book! I cannot recommend it enough.

Awww why did it have to end :( I love this series so much, honestly please can we just have a third no series is complete without a thirds !! What about a youngest sister story ?! Come on! I loved this so much, I can’t part with these girls and these sexy men on the boat. My only qualm is that it was a little too slow build that I usually see in a Tessa Bailey book. And the fact there might not be a third (Hehhe)
I’m so happy you gave me the opp to read this book ahead of release. I will come back to Westport any day. And who knew small towns packed such loveable characters :)

4.5 stars

To say I liked this would be an understatement. It felt like my eyes were glued to the book the entire time and I couldn't stop thinking about it. I honestly enjoyed Fox and Hannah's story more than the first book with Brendan and Piper. I felt the romance stronger and I couldn't stop smiling at them being actual dorks. This book just made me feel everything. I'm deeply in love.

(And because we're introduced to Hannah and Fox through Brendan and Piper, I highly recommend reading their story first to make this book's experience like 10x better.)

This follow-up to 2021's It Happened One Summer absolutely delivered on the romance and humor! A friends-to-lovers romance, the two main characters develop a bond in the first novel that continues in Hook, Line, and Sinker. I wish there were more Bellinger sisters to continue the series!

Hook Line and Sinker
Tessa Bailey
Fox and Hannah
In this sequel to It Happened One Summer sister Hannah, completely immersed in music, is working as a PA for a movie. She yearns to work on the sound track but is just a lowly PA. Then she gets to chance to suggest the filming in Westport, the fishing town where her sister has fallen in love and married a ship captain. Eventually she even gets to suggest a new soundtrack. It is also the town where Fox lives. During the previous summer, to give her sister and the captain a chance for romance, Fox had taken Hannah to a vinyl record show. Since then they’ve been texting back and forth. When Hannah arrives in Westport their romance takes off. But Fox keeps holding back because of his well deserved reputation as a man whore. Can they overcome this?
Tessa Bailey comes through on this sequel. The characters are completely charming. The action is both delightful and sensuous. It is just brilliant!
I would recommend this book to my patrons.

Welcome back to Westport, WA! Tessa Bailey has done it again. How soon is too soon to convince my husband we need to move here so he can become a king crab fisherman alongside Brendan and Fox?
Kidding… kidding… mostly.

I’ll start by saying, friends to lovers is not generally my thing. I’ve never thought it was angsty enough… until now. Hook, Line, and Sinker singlehandedly has me rethinking my stance on this trope. If you’re reading these, please drop some of your fav friends to lovers books in the comments, I’m in the mood to binge a few to see if this is a one time love!

I related to Hannah so well in this book. The way she explains feeling like a support person in her own life instead of the leading lady really hit me hard. The way she can communicate so well with just a song. She pushes people in just the right way without being too forceful, but getting her point across. I genuinely don’t think I’ve ever related so closely to a character before.

And Fox… sweet Fox. He’s going on my list of favorite cinnamon roll characters EVER. I feel this overwhelming need to protect and love him. He experienced so much growth both personally and professionally. He faced some hard truths and had so many breakthroughs.

All in all, this is one of my favorite reads so far this year, and will likely be in my top 10 for the entire year come December. I loved It Happened One Summer, but this one is why Tessa Bailey is now an auto-buy author for me. I loved this book with my entire heart and soul. I can already feel the hangover setting in.

"How did I look at her?"
"Like a summer day showing up after a hundred years of winter."

Tessa Bailey does it again with Hook, Line, and Sinker, the follow-up to It Happened One Summer! In the first book of this series, we hear Piper and Brendan's story, and Hook, Line, and Sinker focuses on Hannah and Fox's story. I loved getting to know these two better and revisiting the town of Westport!

The shared love of music between Hannah and Fox was one of my favorite things, and it plays into the book so well. Their chemistry, their stubbornness, and their vulnerability all made for a great story! It's impossible not to love the Bellinger sisters and Tessa Bailey! I definitely recommend you check this one out next Spring!

THANK YOU to Avon Books for the review copy!

I was SOOOO excited to get the copy of this after tearing through Piper and Brendan's Story. I loved it. I love how the focus was truly on Hannah and Fox with only small sprinkles of Piper and Brendan. I love how Hannah grew in this novel and did NOT give up on Fox. True leading lady vibes. Love loved this one. I really flew through it and was quite sad when it was over. The Epilogue was absolutely perfect as well!! Such a well done series!!!

So I finished this in one evening. I knew I was going to love it, but I didn't expect to blow through it quite this fast. I don't have words for the thrill and joy I'm feeling from riding along on this journey. My heart is light and my stomach is full of butterflies. This friends to lovers was just the pick me up I needed. To see healthy communication and a couple working through their conflicts was refreshing. Neither really ran when things got tough, but they did give each other space and support to work through their issues and struggles. I officially want to move to a port town and marry a fisherman. *Don't tell my husband.

TW: Parental abuse (mental) mentioned

Wow, just wow, I loved this book so much! Ever since meeting Fox and Hannah in "It Happened One Summer" I had felt the spark of chemistry between them...and especially after he left that Fleetwood Mac album for her, that was so so SWEET! Who would've guessed he's been pining for her ever since, ugh my heart!

Hannah and Fox have been texting since the summer she spent in Westport but just as friends and I really liked that. They got to know each other as friends first but without realizing it they already are a little bit in love with one another. Fox has never had a female friend so that's really new for him and the way that Brendan and Piper keep warning him off of Hannah kind of sucked. The way that everyone thought so poorly of Fox and his sexual habits was super sad and I was angered on behalf of him. Hannah was angered too and I loved seeing her stick up for him, she saw something in him that no one was willing to look deeper for in him.

The delicious sexual tension they had when sharing Fox's apartment as so good as well. The pining Fox did just made me all warm and fuzzy, and all his insecurities about making him Hannah work as a couple were just heartbreaking, I'm so glad she had the strength to be there for him and convince him of what a good person he is.

One thing I did not care for was Brinley's reaction to Hannah wanting to learn from her. She went above and beyond into bitch mode instead of realizing the teaching opportunity placed in her lap. She had the chance to further cement women's position into the film industry and she just saw it as as an attack against her and her job. That pissed me off, why do a lot of women have to be this way? Hannah didn't even know if she wanted to have a job like that she just wanted to test the waters. Ugh!

Anyway, Hook, Line and Sinker was dare I say better than It Happened One Summer. I really connected with Fox and Hannah on an emotional level that I didn't with Piper and Brendan. And you don't HAVE to read It Happened One Summer but I really recommend it, you get to see immediately what kind of person Hannah is and that first interaction with her and Fox going to the vinyl convention was so so so good. I will definitely be reading more Tessa Bailey in the near future!

Thank you so much to Avon and HarperVoyager for providing me with an ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I absolutely loved this sequel! Fox and Hannah are the cutest couple to follow up Brennan and Piper.
When Hannah finds a way to move an entire movie shoot in order to visit her sister, she ends up with more than she bargained for when she has to bunk with Fox.

The fun relationship we see planted in IT HAPPEND ONE SUMMER is beautifully grown into a story of acceptance, healing, and love. Hannah and Fox play off of each other so well and keep you rooting for them the whole time.

Thank you dearly to Net Galley and Avon Books for giving me the opportunity to read this ARC.

I want to start this review by making clear two things about myself: 1. I am not a fan of the friends to lovers trope and 2. It Happened One Summer has been my favorite romcom of the year (and probably top 5 of all time). Keeping both of these things in mind, I'd like to collect my thoughts about Hook, Line, and Sinker as concisely as possible.

Things I loved:
Ms. Bailey can write a delicious man like no one else. The spicy scenes were beautiful, romantic, sexy, and honestly everything that I loved about IHOS. I absolutely adored Fox, I liked the way that toxic masculinity was addressed in the story, I liked the way that the two characters resolved their arcs in the story. Do not get me started on the tears that came over me during the epilogue. I was definitely convinced, dare I say became a fan, of the friends to lovers trope through this book. (Looking at "people we meet on vacation" which was my least fav romcom of this year, I would say the tension and will they / won't they in this book had me excited).

What I wish was different:
Now, this is going to be a longer list than I wish it was. Especially since IHOS was perfection in terms of character development and plot.

I'd like to simply ask; what happened to Hannah? I could try to buy into the little sister plot, and the character traits that go with it, but I was not a fan of the way that Hannah was infantilized throughout the novel. There were certain phrases, specifically ones referring to her being a "girl" rather than "woman" by Fox/other men in the novel which made me, a 20smthn lady feel super uncomfortable. Also: massive cringe/mood killer when the question of her virginity comes up.. Hannah is an adult, why did this even need to be mentioned? Especially when the reader had learned about her past relationships several chapters ago. It makes Fox seem out of touch with Hannah. I really disliked the way that she suddenly became a child. In IHOS, Hannah was not the shining start that Piper was but that's because it was Piper's story. Hannah showed grit, courage, stubbornness, fierceness, and strong character that never made me assume that she was a "secondary character". Hannah's ability to give advice or to help other people because she's introspective and empathic does not make her a background character of other people's lives, it simply makes her a person with different skill sets and maybe a tad more introversion than others. (Still, she's proven time and time again that she's extroverted and bold.) The self doubt, self demeaning, and self esteem issues showed here were not the Hannah I expected.

All in all, I did really enjoy this book. I love Ms. Bailey's writing and this hardcopy will be going on my shelf once it is available to the public. The steam and romance in this are 5/5. The MC is 3.5/5. The Main Love interest is 5/5.

“ Apart from being dark and dramatic . . . what makes a man your type? What is eventually going to make a man The One?
Hannah: I think . . . if they can find a reason to laugh with me on the worst day.”

What you will find in this:
✔️Close proximity
✔️Romance between high end LA girl and Fisherman

Dnf at 45% because I couldn’t connect to the writing and I found too much of repetition. The story didn’t hook me right in.

Hook, Line, and Sinker features characters that were featured in one of Tessa Bailey's other books, It Happened One Summer. They were secondary characters, but Tessa gave readers enough of them that you wanted them to have their own book.

Hannah and Fox's friends to lovers story is swoony and brimming with feels. It was everything I wanted in their story and yet so much more.
Fans of this author's books will fall absolutely in love with this original read and fans of romance books will certainly gobble this up!

I can't wait to read more from this series and author.

4 stars - A beautiful friends-to-lovers romance that had me laughing from the very first chapter.

After reading It Happened One Summer, I was pretty much salivating for this book. So I ran over to NG, put in my request and anxiously waited approval. (Lucky for me, I read The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood during this time, so the wait wasn't too agonizing.) Then I finally got approved, sent it to my Kindle, and proceeded to binge read the heck out of this beauty. And it was really good!

In and of itself, Hook, Line, and Sinker is a swoon-worthy romance. Fox and Hannah are a perfectly matched couple. They understand each other on a special level. They start as friends and grow so close they can't help but take notice of their chemistry. It was built up so well, and I truly enjoyed it.

That said, this book also has the pressure of following up It Happened One Summer, which I was obsessed with. I'm still in love with it. So I can't help but compare the two, and I personally preferred book 1.

But with THAT said, I still had an amazing time reading this one. Like I said, the romance was lovely. And now please allow me to declare my undying affection for Hannah and Fox. Both of which have their own hang-ups, but watching them grow and work through them was a delight.

And it must be said that Fox is so head over heels for Hannah the entire way through this story and I LOVED it. Did he mess up? Of course. But his remorse was instant every time, and he always put in the effort to make it right and learn to be better. I respect that a whole heck of a lot, and it was so refreshing.

Overall, Hook, Line, and Sinker was a lovely, fun friends-to-lovers romance that I can already tell I'm going to love more and more with each re-read. Because I WILL be re-reading it. And even though I personally preferred It Happened One Summer, I am positive there are going to be readers who prefer this one because it IS a great novel. I definitely recommend picking it up no matter what, because Fox and Hannah are more than worth a shot!

**note: the blog post link is to a review post scheduled to go up closer to release date on 2/26/22!!

I must be honest and admit that I wasn't a huge Bailey fan....until this series. I enjoyed the first book in this series so much that when I saw my approval for an advanced copy of the next I devoured it immediately.

I must say....this one was even a bit better. I love that Bailey took an issue, slut shaming, and really dove deep into how it really can impact one's life. In this case we see the victim as the male. The author did a fantastic job of allowing us see what can truly become a tumultuous low in self esteem when everyone around you thinks they have you pegged.

It was just brilliant. I really found myself completely enthralled. Great job Tessa Bailey.

After reading "It Happened One Summer" I was dying to see where Hannah's story would go. Unlike her sister, Piper, Hannah is a little too comfortable playing second fiddle. When given the chance to make herself seen and heard, she goes to the one place where she doesn't feel unseen: Westport. Welcoming her to the coastal town is her sexy, carefree friend, Fox. Seven months of friendship has created a safe place for both Fox and Hannah, one that is tested in "Hook, Line, and Sinker".

What unfolds is both personal and professional growth for Fox and Hannah. Can they shake off the thoughts of others and their own insecurities and take their friendship to the next level? Hannah is hands down my favorite Bellinger sister. "Hook, Line, and Sinker" is chalked full lessons in self worth, determination and second chances at love.