Wow. I am instantly a Natalie Murray fan. The is raw, and funny, and real, and everything I didn’t know I wanted to read. The realization of two friends is where she shines as an author.
I’m giving it a firm ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ but do have notes as always. I think the repercussions on the Tesla accident were a bit extreme for the weight they were given, either a downplayed accident, or an increased female main character reaction were merited. I also felt like his needing space when moving away becomes well understood, but her attempts to be there for him don’t exactly translate, it appears she may have given up due to her anxiety, but that isn’t clearly stated.
Overall, I would highly recommend this book and want to say thank you NetGalley for the opportunities to review it.

This is a sweet Aussie romance with some heavy topics.

As a fellow Australian, it made me smile reading about places that I have been and references that I understand.

Being a friends to lovers we get a lot of their history in the form of alternating chapters but they are well timed that the little bits of their younger years supports the developing relationship they have today.

This story hangs heavily on the lack of communication trope (not really miscommunication, because that would imply they actually addressed the elephant in the room). Zac was an absolute gem of an MMC, despite everything he was a well developed character and so supportive. Josie is incredibly driven and but puts her health on the back seat choosing to ignore rather than face the possibility she could be genuinely unwell.
I can relate to her on a lot of levels but her relationship with Lindsay irked me to no end. Once you throw in Meghan, this was more than a love triangle, a love square? A double love triangle?

There was so much trauma and mental health representation in this book that I think was handled quite well. Both of our main characters have struggles of their own, including loss of a loved one, PTSD, health anxiety, anxiety attacks, and isolation.

Overall I enjoyed this read.

Absolutely loved it! I can never decide if Friends to Lovers or Second Chance Romance is my fav troupe but I feel like this one kind of had both. The rekindling of a friendship that turns into Romance. This is definitely my new comfort read, I can see myself reaching for it again and again.

I really enjoyed Love, Just In. It was the perfect slow burn, childhood friends to lovers romance.

I couldn't put it down - I laughed, blushed, and even cried throughout. It has great romance and banter but also touches on important topics like cancer, health anxiety, grief, and trauma. Those topics can be difficult to discuss but Natalie Murray did it with grace and compassion.

I loved Josie and Zac's friendship and their slow burn romance was well worth the wait. I really enjoyed the Newcastle, Australia setting as well. If you like Emily Henry, you will thoroughly enjoy this book.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest review!

📖𝑩𝒐𝒐𝒌 𝑹𝒆𝒗𝒊𝒆𝒘📖⁠
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'Love, Just In' - ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⁠
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"Every time you look at me, I feel like there's no breath left in my body. It's like you have completely filled my head, and there's no room for anything else. And to be honest, I don't know what to do about it."⁠
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First of all, I loved that the story was set in Newcastle (Australia), a place I lived in and near for many years. It was so interesting to read about a place I know so well!⁠
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Friends to lovers is not normally a trope I go for, but Natalie Murray gave me a whole new appreciation for it. I think she did such a good job of expressing the love, confusion, and anxieties of Zac and Josie, which made the story realistic. ⁠
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'Love, Just In' made me laugh out loud and cry to the point that my husband was asking if I was okay. I look forward to purchasing the book for my bookshelf when it is released next year.⁠
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Thank you to NetGalley and @allenandunwin #allenandunwinaustralia for allowing me to read and review 'Love, Just In'!⁠ I strongly suggest you check it out when it is released in January 2024.⁠
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Synopsis:⁠
Sydney TV news reporter Josephine "Josie" Larsen is approaching 30 and coming dangerously close to failing at life. Lost in a vortex of other people's career milestones, engagement parties, and baby showers, Josie is perennially single, abandoned by her globetrotting family, and invisible to her boss - except for the one time he tuned in while she was mid-panic attack on live TV. As a punishment, Josie is shipped off to cover another reporter's six-month leave at a regional bureau in Newcastle.⁠
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But Josie has more waiting for her in Newcastle than yawn-inducing stories about bicycle lane protests. The city is also the domain of Zac Jameson - her best friend since high school. This should be a happy turn of events, but Zac has barely spoken to Josie for the past two years. ⁠
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Now thrown back into each other's lives, Josie and Zac have to navigate their neglected friendship and secret attraction to each other while struggling with their careers and mental health.⁠
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#bookreview #bookish #booklover #bookstagrammer #bookstagram #bookworm #bookaddict #bookrecommendations

I could not have loved this more!! Thank you to @netgalley for the chance to review Natalie Murphy’s Love, Just In. Newscaster Josie has a panic attack on air and continues to experience health anxiety. She moves to a new place and reconnects with her old best friend, Zac. The stories moves between memories and the present, and we get to know the characters and how their feelings for each other have evolved throughout the last 14 years. So sweet; a little spicy; and I loved the anxiety rep!

This book gave me all the feelings. I laughed (Zac has the best taste in t-shirts), I cried, I raged, I swooned, I overheated (the spice is so hot) and I absolutely loved every second of this book.

Natalie brought some mental health issues to light within this book, and it felt so real and relatable. I love when characters feel like your friends, your family, your neighbors. It makes them so relatable.

Josie is so relatable. Her struggles were so real. I really enjoyed seeing her make mistakes and then also own them. I want to be her friend.

Zac makes me want to crawl into his lap and give a hug and never let go.

I really enjoyed the flashbacks into their friendships. And their text messages.

✔️Single POV (except the epilogue)
✔️Set in Australia
✔️Contemporary romance
✔️Friends to lovers

This book follows two friends about 15 years out of high school. Zac and Josie have missed their chance to become more than friends many times. Now, they live in two different places, and Zac is dating someone else. Josie is batting hypochondria about developing cancer. Her fear of death has been developing since Zac’s college girlfriend died in a car accident — with Zac in the passenger seat.

The health anxiety takes center stage in the last third of the book. Josie finds a lump in her breast, and she is also assigned multiple breast cancer awareness stories in her work as a TV reporter. When her career and anxiety meet, she continues to mess up advancement opportunities with on-air panic attacks.

Starting a story in high school is not my favorite plotting device. It immediately makes the characters seem too juvenile for real romance. The non-chronological time jumps continue throughout the book. Leaps back in time can take you away from the building suspense and don’t always add to the story or character development. Editing these down could have make this 400+ page book tighter.

The love confession was truly beautiful, and there were a couple of exquisitely spicy scenes that made the wait worthwhile!

Rating: 4 stars!

Content warnings: Health anxiety; breast cancer

ARC copy acquired through Net Galley with approval from Allen & Unwin.

Thank you net galley and publisher for this ARC. A cute story in Australia and the first book I've read by this author.

The basic lack of self-awareness in this MC left me rolling my eyes more than once. She basically had to make the same mistake 3 times before it occurred to her that she should do something about her problem, which, like...right.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Josie and Zac are friends. Best friends. The kind of friend you're lucky to find in life.

Zac also is love with Josie. He has been since they were teens and he's harbored the feelings his whole life.

Josie wants to read the news on T.V. When an opportunity arises that allows her that for her to do just that and also brings her closer to Zac, after a 2-year gap in their friendship, she takes it.

What happens when they come together again is beautiful and painful at the same time. You never know when you'll meet the person you're meant to be with.

Thank you Netgalley for the chance to read this!
Josie and Zac are life-long best friends, brought back together after a few years apart in a forced-proximity trope, forced to finally confront the lingering attraction between them and decide if the potential romance between them is worth jeopardizing their friendship. Told in a dual timeline narrative, you get a beautiful insight into the friendship these two share in the past. The B story lines are dripping with some heavy trigger warnings (alcoholism, medical anxiety, cancer, car accidents, death, grief) but I thought done in a way that was really respectful. You really could feel how heavy these topics weighed on both leads and shaped their interiority (particularly Josie's). This is incredibly steamy as well...the burn is a bit slow but the spice is sizzling.
I enjoyed this a ton. The dialogue between Josie and Zac reminded me of Joey/Pacey in Dawson's Creek: it has a bit of that long-winded 90's romance style to it. But I didn't mind: I LOVED how connected Zac was with his emotions. As someone who has been in a 'will they wont they' with a best friend, this hit every single one of those emotional challenges so well.

An above-average romance from a new Australian writer.

As a 50-something who's been married to the same man for 20 years, I'm probably not the target audience for a novel about two 28-year-olds finding love. I did, however, find their relationship touching and understood how both of them might want to protect their friendship above all else. The explanation of how her health anxiety operated helped to ease some of the anxiety I felt at her lack of action.

~ Two best friends. One missed chance. Six months that change everything ~

This was a beautiful romance, but also a really beautiful story.

Josie and Zac are childhood friends who have drifted apart after uni and various life events. Josie moves to the town that Zac now lives in - Newcastle NSW (also my hometown, so that was a cute bonus), and we get to see them rekindle their friendship through Josie's POV.

These characters felt very real and were relatable, and the dialogue was realistic and conversational. This story had its share of beautiful heartwarming moments and also gut-wrenching ones. At times I honestly could not put it down.

This book dealt with so many big issues; grief, trauma, anxiety (particularly health anxiety), and I think they were done really well, with tact, respect, and realism. Especially the health anxiety.

I highly recommend this book and thanks to Netgalley and Allen and Unwin for the eARC in exchange for an honest review 🌼

Love, Just In comes out January 3rd 2024 - put it on your wishlist.

Natalie is a gifted writer and I've not been disappointed once with her books. The characters feel real and it's such a great love story!

This was overall a good story, but I struggled to get into it. Her anxiety was difficult to read and while people really deal with it this, reading the same line three times over because the protagonist is struggling isn't really for me.

Thanks Netgalley for allowing me to read this book. Josie is back in her hometown after being gone awhile. She sees her Zac who she hasn't seen in ages. This book was a quick read.

4.25/5

This was a really enjoyable book with two incredibly likable main characters. The story follows Josie Larsen an aspiring TV news reporter and her best friend since high school, Zac Jameson. As Josie moves to Newcastle, where Zac lives, she dreams of returning to Sydney and anchoring for the news station she works for. Unexpectedly, she grows to love the sleepy seaside town of Newcastle over the hustle and bustle of Sydney.

I think this book does an excellent job in tackling real life issues and topics that are important in relationships and are, sadly, unavoidable in real life. A lot of romance novels avoid things like grief, anxiety, and panic attacks, but this story takes them head on and makes the characters and story more realistic.

Pros: likable and relatable main characters, friends to lovers trope, realistic struggles and challenges that both main characters face

Cons: lack of communication between the main characters, a lot of conflict could’ve been resolved by them just talking to each other

Overall, I’d recommend this book to anyone looking for a beach read that delves into real life issues and is grounded in reality. I loved the relationship between Josie and Zac, but really appreciated that the author had them dealing with their individual struggles together.

Thank you NetGalley and Allen & Unwin for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This was an incredibly sweet book with a very believable friends to lovers trope. It's not often you read books where you can feel that secret longing from both sides but this book does it. I think it was also great to read from only the FMC instead of switching POVs like many do. I don't believe the flashbacks were necessary and often ruined the pace of the book for me.

This book is a real punch in the guts, in a good way… obviously. Love, just in is a second chance story about two best friends who grew up together and, until two years ago, they were inseparable. We go back and forth between flash back and current day as we try to work out exactly what happened.

I could really feel Josie’s health anxiety and o feel like a lot of people can relate, especially post covid. Terrified of every little symptom but also too scared to actually go and get it checked out because ignorance is bliss! You were right there inside Zac’s grief and guilt and both of their confusion on how to move forward. I definitely shed some tears during this story.

I feel like Natalie could be on the board for Newy’s tourism cause she really made me wanna visit. She also made me very glad that I never had roommates like those…

Thanks to #NetGallery and the publisher. I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Genre: Romance
Format: Digital
POV: Single
Spice: 🌶️🌶️/5
Age suggestion: 18+