4.5 stars

Hello Stranger
Katherine Center

- NYC setting
- a portrait artist who is left faceblind in her surgery recovery process
- your next favorite geriatric doggo
- a hot vet, hipster helpful neighbor, sweet best friend (with an even sweeter Korean family), and an evil stepmom + stepsister – what a mix of characters!!

Katherine Center does it again! Characters that are flawed with such realness that makes connecting with stories so easy. Loveable friends and relationships. Encapsulating the lowest despairs and the victorious highs in the human experience so vividly, the anticipation in how the stories unravel is just so good! These are my favorite kind of romance

I appreciate Center’s research poured into bringing this story to life! I also loved getting to see her friend, Sue, and Sue’s parents be a loving presence to Sadie. Oftentimes, we see white families being the safe place for non-white kids so although a seemingly small detail here, it was huge for me to see Sue’s parents care for Sadie so well

navigating new normals, re-finding yourself, processing grief in new stages, there is just so much to be felt with this book!

👀 BOOK REVIEW: Hello Stranger 👀

SUMMARY: Sadie Montgomery is an up-and-coming portrait artist whose career seems derailed after a health scare leaves her with face blindness. This new perspective causes Sadie to reevaluate every part of her life, from her job to her relationship with her family to whether we should date her dog’s handsome vet or her annoyingly cute neighbor.

I enjoyed this book! It was interesting and well-written, and I was rooting for Sadie throughout—not specifically to return to her pre-surgery self—but to at least come to terms with her new capabilities.

I thought her banter and budding relationship with her neighbor was charming and swoon-worthy, and I wanted to punt her evil stepsister to the moon.

My only hangup was a personal one: This would be terrifying in real life! To never know who it is you’re speaking to? Also, did she also lose her vocal recognition? 💀

What you can expect from this book (and, based on what I’ve read so far, most Katherine Center books):

💖 Legitimately good writing
💖 A flawed but likable heroine
💖 Romance + personal development
💖 The HEA you’re here for

⭐⭐⭐⭐

I really did love the bodyguard but this was fun as well! I will definitely pick up anything else that Katherine Center writes!

This was a super fun romance, with great chemistry between the characters and a wacky premise that kept me turning pages. Love Center's voice as always!

Sadie appeared selfish, whiny, and rude before her surgery, and I just could not relate for even empathize with her after her surgery. There were a lot of inconsistencies in the story, such as Sadie remembering voices and name. It didn’t make sense.

This book was… odd. I went into it expecting more of a romance but it was definitely more contemporary fiction with a romance subplot. It for sure kept me on my toes though and I did not see the ending coming.

Enjoyable! Lots of twists and turns through this slow burn. The lack of communication between the main characters was frustrating sometimes, but overall a good read!

I enjoyed reading about Sadie’s unexpected challenging personal journey and how she managed to adapt. It was an emotional and inspiring journey. I admired her perseverance and resilience. And of course, the endearing love story that is not without a twist. This book was light and heartwarming despite the depth of the content, as is all of Katherine Center’s books. Another amazing read by this author.

You can not go wrong with Katherine. She writes sweet romances that will stay with you for a while.

The character development was fantastic and the story felt so real. Very much enjoyed.

this was a mixed bag for me generally. liked some parts of the story especially the growth with her family and her confidence.

I’m of the firm opinion that the reader’s state of mind affects their enjoyment of a book. So in this context, I think I need to re-read this book at some other time and re-assess my reaction. At the moment, I felt that this book was more depressing than funny. There were some brilliant parts, a few moments in which I felt the humor, but for me it was mostly sad.

I saw Sadie as a woman failing at her life and her career. She was stubbornly clinging to the “I’m fine” fantasy, in spite of having a ruined relation with her father, a not very successful career in art portraiture, living in a crappy studio on the roof of a building, and with more debts than income. She wasn’t all that cheerful, she was just faking it as best she could, and most of the time I thought she was too deluded, mired in fantasy. And she only had one friend, Sue, with Sue’s very kind parents, owners of the building, who allowed her to live in the rooftop.

Then on top of all those issues, Sadie developed a neurological disfunction that affected how she related to persons. There’s a lot of confusions and miscommunications that happen that could read like a comedy, but I didn’t get that feeling. The author’s excessive blabbing, explaining ad nauseam about the prosopagnosia condition made reading a little tedious. After I finished the book, the theme was incredibly interesting but it needed to be a tighter portion of the book and let the character’s dialogue handle the information rather than give us such long explanations.

There’s a huge plot-twist towards the end that brought a lot of factors in the book into comical relief, and this is where I finally felt like I was reading this author’s usual writing style.

This is very sad because I have loved this author’s previous books. Even though I liked the characters in this story, I found it was more depressing than fun, and it beats the purpose of why I chose this book. Usually the character is going through a bad patch but there are extenuating circumstances, like lovely family, lovely friends, but Sadie’s problems seem to be compounding all the time, not resolving, and she had a toxic family that didn’t seem to get better. Then we got a fast solution on the epilogue.

I absolutely adore this book and Katherine Center! As a psychologist with a neuropsych background, I am always a harsher rater when people are writing about mental health and brain-related topics because I hope the author has done their research and accurately portrays these aspects of health. She did an amazing job describing the experience of someone with acquired prosopagnosia (face blindness).

Overall, this book had GREAT character development and I enjoyed the plot. When faced with a difficult romantic situation between two men, Sadie did not lead both guys on to her benefit, but straight up communicated that she has feelings for someone else. The communication in this book is on another level!

Katherine Center is an auto-buy author for me <3

I received a free ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I loved this book. The characters were so good. The plot moved along well with several pleasant surprises. I like the way Center tells a story like you’re talking to your best friend. Face blindness has been used in several books,, usually thrillers. So, this was a refreshing take on it. Also, the author’s note at the end was fantastic.

This was my first Katherine Center book and it was very cute. I know she loves happily ever afters and I loved that too in this book. She brought a lot of personality and character into the female lead Sadie and I really enjoyed that. I was expecting more romance in this book. I knew it would be "closed door", but there really wasn't much of any type of romance going on except for the two kissing scenes, and I just personally prefer more than that in my favorite romance novels. Overall a very cute story. I would recommend this book to others with the right expectations, and I would/will read more from Katherine Center. I plan to post a review of this book to @_amy_reads_ on instagram on Wednesday, September 20th.

Katherine Center is back and love isn't blind....just a bit blurry:

Sadie has been on her own for a while now, trying to find her place in the world after the death of her mother when she was a teenager and her father bringing in a stepmother and sister into her life, who made her life a living hell. But things seem to be changing when she is announced as one of the top 10 finalists in a portrait competition. She decided to celebrate and everything changes. She gets diagnosed with face blindness, not something you want to hear when you're a portrait artist and now have a competition coming up. Sadie cannot even see her won face. As she struggles to scope she seems to meet two men, who could not be different from the other, but she feels drawn to both of them even though she has no idea what they look like. Could love really be blurry?

Alright here me out, I both enjoyed and disliked this book at the same time. Firstly, I loved the concept of this book and the idea of Face blindness is one that I have not heard about before and seems slightly terrifying at that, especially in the way that Sadie got it. But man was I not a fan of Sadie most of the time. I found her irritating, immature, and just wanting to punch her at times. I know mean but god just have a simple conversation about the face blindness especially when her and Joe really became more serious. I think that Said was portray younger than her 29 years, I mean she had insta-love with a man she could not see and then created a fantasy in her head about them getting married after one meeting. Just a bit too hard for me to believe a 29 year old would think that way. But I will say once I got to the 80% mark really got me and i was feeling all the emotions.

I liked that this book even had a bad girl, an arch nemesis, if you will for Sadie who is destined to destroy everything positive that she has going in her life. I found it heartbreaking and comical at times the length that her "evil step-sister" would take in order to make Sadie's life a living hell. Anyone else feel a spin off book here for Parker, i feel like that would be a character arc of the century.

To put things simply Joe is just a delightful golden retriever who is simply amazing.

This book tried to have some mystery thrown in on it, or at least I think it tried to with the whole love triangle between Sadie, Joe and the Dr. but i personally thought it was pretty obvious so that why i said Tried. I mean how does a reader not make the connection and then we are stuck waiting for Sadie to figure it out.

So overall just okay for me as I loved the face blindness aspect, evil step-sister and Joe but I just could not love the main character.

Enjoy!!!!

Such a great book. SO amazing. katherine center cant do any wrong. Face blindness was a unquie storyline

I enjoyed this book, but was only able to give it three stars because there was a suicide sub plot that came up in the story a couple of times that I did not think was handled well. It felt thrown in there as another (unnecessary example) that Sadie's stepsister Parker was an awful person, and it I felt it wasn't given the weight that such a topic deserved. It was brushed over in light, airy way to match the tone of the rest of the book, so I'm not sure why it was included. I don't think it was needed to characterize Parker since there were so many other scenes that did that successfully. Besides the stepsister, who never redeemed herself, I did enjoy most of the other characters. The story was cute, if not a little unbelievable that Sadie was so oblivious to Joe's identity. Not my favorite of this author, but The Bodyguard is hard to beat.

So there’s a scene in this book where a man is making a bunch of overtly fat-phobic and body shaming comments that appear to be about a woman he had a one-night stand with. Later, he claims he was talking about a dog. Whatever is true, it’s gross and so unnecessary. Why is this even in the book? Anyway, the book is fine buts it’s by no means great, and this makes it a miss for me. Additionally, I would give CWs for grappling with past death of a parent (mom) and seriously strained relationship with a parent (dad).

I know a lot of people loved Center Stage but it didn't hit me as hard as this one did. I really thought the face blindedness aspect added an interesting twist. And I felt empathetic toward this as I had a medical treatment once that caused a similar effect but only for 48 hours. It was enough for me to be super frustrated and also appreciate something so "overlooked" such as distinguising between facial features. Anyway, I really liked this book and I thought it was a nice balance of "easy read" and "so much more"! :)

An all around feel good, heart warming novel. Center had me laughing at loud numerous times throughout the book. You can’t help but fall in love with Center’s story and characters!!

Thank you netgalley and st. Martins for providing me with an earc!