What a delightful book! I loved this conceit: "I hate everything about you but everyone I've ever dated is exactly like you, oh fuck." Also known as nemeses-to-lovers AND one shared brain cell. Throw in a soupçon of forced proximity and you have Someone Just Like You!

My favorite things about Meredith Schorr's writing include the genius-level character names and more importantly, character nicknames they come up for each other (even more believable that the characters came up with them for each other as children iykyk). As a New York resident, the details about microneighborhoods are thrillingly accurate. And, pssst, this is not-so-secretly a baseball book!

The first half of this book had me in a chokehold. It is compulsively readable. Two childhood neighbors, Molly and Jude, who spent most of their childhood disliking and constantly pranking one another, are paired up to help plan their respective parents' anniversary parties. I enjoyed reading about the pranks, because there was some fun banter there. Molly is a lawyer-turned-legal recruiter who is starting to realize that her plans for her career haven't matched up to reality, and Jude is a bartender whose dreams of making the big leagues as a baseballer had been dashed after an accident in high school.

Eventually, we are told that the two continuously date people who have a lot in common, both looks and personality-wise, with the very person they despise-each other! The reason this ended up falling a bit flat was because it was more in the telling. The pranking had the potential to up the flirtation, and Jude helping Molly when she was sick was very cute. But things didn't really kick into gear for these two until everyone kept telling Molly how much she kept dating people who were like Jude (why did she need so many other people telling her that?)

But what took me completely out of the story was when (spoiler) the two main characters hook up for the first time. It was written in such a goofy ass way that I lost most of the interest there. Like I could honestly picture the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme song playing over it. It was like the opposite of romantic and sexy. And then later, there's drama because of course there is. Molly finally reveals the big secret at around 70% or so, the two make up, and I'm thinking to myself uh-oh it seems like these two characters who are so dissimilar to one another need to have more conflict because there's a full 30% of the book left. And they did, again, and it was dragged for most of that last portion of the book. And I couldn't help but think like yeah Jude was kind of right. They had the potential for friendship, but the romantic spark was lost for me when they did and said terrible things to each other. Overall this was a bit of a disappointment for me, but this is great for people who enjoy childhood friends to sort of enemies to lovers. And there's goldendoodles, for dog lovers.