This book was sooo messy in the best of ways, I swear. I could not put it down because every new plot twist and chapter cliffhanger and the overall chaos of this book had me on edge waiting to find out what would happen!!! The entire time I was either wanting to curse out characters or smoosh their faces together and make them kiss and make up.

Pining after a man you've known for 10 years knowing you never had a chance? Story of my life actually. So while I found myself getting irritated at Marcela for making a stupid decision I could only really be irritated at myself because let's be honest I'd act the exact same way. I will say she could really work on her communication skills (who amongst us can't though)

Theo is the sweetest, most patient man ever and his whole "this isn't over for me" and pursuit of Marcela when she's struggling with her feelings... we all need a man as patient and understanding as him. He falls first (and harder) imo and I love him for it; he's a beautiful, big football player who's willing to listen to Marcela's long book rants and remember it all which made my heart melt.

My hang ups with this book are the way Marcela runs from Theo, I just don't like tropes in books where one party runs from their feelings or there is miscommunication, not really giving them a reason to "break up." Like, just talk and no one would have this problem.

Was a really sweet story, I am really happy that we got plus size rep, and I am really happy with how her story turned out. I’m also really happy for her self discovery in regards to relationships in her life and for herself. Overall a really enjoyable read!

BIPOC Steamy Romance that features two broken hearts, a librarian and an ex-NFL player, who decide the best way to get over their first loves is with a no-strings-attached relationship.

4/5 stars: This is the first in Gamez's Librarians in Love series which is a Steamy Romance that takes place in Texas and follows a librarian and an ex-NFL player who decide the best way to get over their first loves getting married is to have a no-strings-attached relationship with each other but they're soon falling in love. Gamez's writing outstanding but the character work is excellent; the characters are well-rounded, complex and yet remain likable. While Marcela and Theo are dealing with a lot in their lives and seem to be complete opposites but as they get to know each other find they have more in common then they thought possible. Oh and I really loved Marcela's colleague and friend, Angela. Gamez's humor shines and the banter and flirting are on high and will have you swooning. Oh and the OPS scenes are incredibly steamy. While there are plenty of humorous moments, Gamez does takes on same sensitive subjects, so take care and check the CWs. I look forward to reading more from this author.

I received this eARC thanks to NetGalley and Forever (Grand Central Publishing), Forever in exchange for an honest review. Publishing dates are subject to change.

I wanted so badly to like the book but unfortunately the writing was just not for me. The story had a lot of potential- I liked the premise a lot and am always excited to read books where the FMC is different than the stereotypical “perfect” girl, but I couldn’t get past the writing style and ended up not even finishing because of it.

Cute but MESSY!! Haha. The entire storyline stressed me out with their love square. And I would 100% be the best friend urging their gf to sprint in the other direction of the chaos. But I enjoyed seeing the Latina and mid size/plus size representation! Although I would say it’s a bit triggering to those who have dealt with ED or low self-esteem because it focused a lot on her insecurities with her size in relationships. I’d say both MCs were a little bit one dimensional and I didn’t understand the timeline of their relationship? When they finally confessed the I love yous I was shocked because it felt like a month so imagine my surprise when they said it had been six 😂

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the arc! The Next Best Fling comes out July 2024.

The Next Best Fling is a single POV friends-with-benefits romance. Marcela has been in love with her ex/ best friend for almost a decade and she’s trying to keep a happy face for him when he gets engaged. Theo, the groom-to-be’s older brother, is hopelessly in love with the bride-to-be and drunkenly decides to announce this at their engagement party. When Marcela intervenes before Theo can disrupt everything, the two form an unlikely friendship and decide that a fling to help each other rebound is in order!

This book was a lot of fun while also being a little more drama-heavy than I expected. I loved it though! I liked the representation on the page, Marcela’s passion for books, and Theo’s passion for Marcela! Definitely worth the read and I’ll be on the lookout for more from this author!

Read dates: 06/11/2024- 06/13/2024
Goodreads review: 06/13/2024
Instagram review: 06/13/2024
Blog review: 07/09/2024

More like 4.25-4.5!

I really really enjoyed this story! I loved the characters. I saw through Ben’s manipulative ass from the start and I’m glad I was right and he didn’t get any kind of redemption. The only reason it’s not a true 5 is because I felt like Marcela spent the ENTIRE book with her head elsewhere. Never truly truly enjoying her connection with Theo until the very end. Everything always came to a halt because of Ben or her insecurities with Theo wanting Alice still when my dude spent so much time reassuring her. 😫

Overall loved the writing. Loved seeing the Mexican representation. 🇲🇽 Will definitely be recommending this book to friends and can not wait to read more from Gabriella Gamez!

The Next Best Fling by Gabriella Gamez kept me up half the night to finish it! I absolutely adored this story of unrequited love, unexpected attraction, and fake dating. Perfect for fans of Emily Henry's Funny Story, I especially loved a librarian-football coach romance since I am a librarian and my husband coaches football!

Huge thanks to the author, the publisher, and NetGalley for allowing me to read and review this fantastic rom-com!

Marcela Ortiz is a Teen Librarian that has had a crush on her best friend Ben for ten years. She has been waiting for a chance all this time, but her world crumbles as he gets engaged. Marcela knows that this time she definitely has to move on, and her coworker bestie advises her to have a fling (or multiple) to take him out of her system. In her search for the perfect rebound, she ends up helping ex-NFL player Theo, who is no other than her best friend’s oldest brother. He has been in love with his brother’s fiancé since they were young, and Marcela gives him the same advice her bestie gave her. Seems like a good deal since both of them have someone they have to get over, and are craving a distraction, right?   
 
When I tell you that I loved this book and cried multiple times, I’m not even kidding. I saw myself in Marcela, a curvy librarian that struggles to be confident even when she knows she’s beautiful.  

Usually a story about falling in love with the brother of your “ex” would’ve been hard to digest and not my cup of tea. But this novel was different, because as you put yourself in her position (if you’re curvy as I am) you understand why she would think she was “in love with him”. The vulnerability of thinking and holding on to the idea of being unworthy for anyone else and after that many years, discovering that you’re worthy of love, REAL love. A love that will make you feel wanted and desired. Not what you thought it was, not what the other guy gave you for 10 years waiting for him to choose you. Taking the scraps. The typical “you accept the love you think you deserve”.

I give this book 4.5/5✨

Fake Dating to Survival➡️ to Friends➡️ to Lovers
Mexican American FMC
Plus Size Representation

This book comes out on July 9! Put your alarms and write it in your calendars, so you don’t miss it out! 

Huge thanks to netgalley and Gabriella Gamez for the ARC. 💖

“Call me what you want,” he says against my lips. “As long as I get to call you mine.”

The Next Best Fling was the type of romance book that you sit down and keep reading until you finish it. And that is exactly what I did. Marcela and Theo’s story had me hooked from the very beginning and left me on the edge of my seat wanting to know what was next and how their story would resolve.

One aspect of this novel that really resonated with me was Marcela being a plus-size and curvy woman. The author did a wonderful job of showcasing how a woman can love her body and who she is while also still having valid moments of insecurity and doubt, especially when it comes to the physicality of a new relationship or fling. It was real and it was relatable as someone that exists in a larger body.

Some of my favorite scenes were between Marcela and her mom. I loved that her mom was always bringing her food to replenish her stock of homemade goods and wanted the tea about who she was dating. The scene where Theo tags along was absolutely precious and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since finishing the book!

This ex’s brother, fake dating situationship between a librarian and ex-NFL player was messy and steamy at the same time. And the pining in this book? EVERYTHING. Theo was such a darling love interest who made me love a blond fictional man — what a feat. A blond MMC? It’s not often I’m like “yes, he’s the one!!”

Overall, this was such a wonderful romance read and I’m excited to see more Librarians in Love books.

This book centered in on Marcela, a youth librarian in love with her best friend, Ben - who is getting married to her former college best friend. Sounds complicated, right? Enter Theo, the groom's brother who is just about to blow up Ben's engagement to Alice when Marcela steps in to stop him. And then subsequently start a fake fling with Theo so they both can get over their decade-long infatuation. Sounds messy, right? Right.

I wanted to love this book, but it had too many aspects going against it. The plot and storyline were fantastic and had the right potential, but the writing was very, very repetitive and so slow-moving that it became boring at times. I got annoyed reading about how much Marcella loved Ben and waited for him for ten years. She came off as too self-deprecating and immature, making her character unrelatable and unenjoyable. I couldn't tell if I was supposed to like Theo at first because we were first introduced to a flashback of him in a drunken rage. Hello, red flag! I don't think there was absolutely zero chemistry between Theo and Marcella, but I wish there were more. I like how Theo listened to Marcella and gave her opportunities to explain herself, but he felt a tad too bland and vanilla, not a lot of personality.

I wish during the scene when Angela and Marcella were speaking Spanish in front of Theo, instead of having their conversation in the Spanish language with an English translation in italics, they just had their conversation printed in English. I would have loved to have the opportunity to read the Spanish and see the English translation. I also think it was a missed opportunity to have Theo be fluent in Spanish.

Another gripe about repetition is the amount of cupping of the face and cheeks that happened. I wish they could have cupped something other than each other's faces! I eye-rolled after the third or fourth cupping. Also, the rift between Ben and Theo was messy and confusing and we never got the full story of how Ben caused Theo to injure his knee. Ben was made out to be the villain, but the process of painting him that way was too long and drawn out.

Overall the idea was great, but perhaps the editing should have been a bit more keen. Thank you to Netgalley and Forever Publishing for the chance to read this advanced copy in exchange for my honest opinion.

What an entertaining book this was! If you're a fan of drama, pining, and tension, you won't want to miss The Next Best Fling!

I laughed, I was frustrated, and this book had me on a rollercoaster of emotions. I hated Ben with a passion. I loved Theo and Marcela and was rooting for them the whole time.

Things I liked:
📖 Love square
📖 They're each other's rebounds
📖 Librarian x ex-NFL player
📖 He's the sweetest
📖 They both learn to trust
📖 Books!!

"Call me whatever you want," he says against my lips. "As long as I get to call you mine."

This book is sweet and earnest. The MCs run into so many great will-they/won’t-they situations. Fun, lighthearted read.

The Next Best Fling by Gabriella Gamez was an easy, comfortable read. It was well written, and I enjoyed it while I read it, but I did not linger on the story or want to go back and reread it.

Marcela has been in love with her best friend for years, but it was unrequited. Theo is also in love with a childhood friend and about to share his love for her when Marcela intervenes. After a misunderstanding, Marcela and Theo pretend to be together.

Marcela Ortiz has had a crush on Ben Young for well over eight years (!!) and, in My Best Friend’s Wedding style, Ben has become engaged to another woman, Alice. Spirited librarian Marcela is expected to attend the wedding in spite of her secretly broken heart, and that means being a part of all of the pre-wedding festivities. She finds herself distracted from her heartbreak by Ben’s older brother, Theo. A former NFL player looking for a new life beyond the field, he, too, has a secret crush… on Ben’s fiancée, Alice, his own long-term friend. Marcela is horrified when Theo tries to confess at the engagement dinner that he’s in love with his brother’s bride-to-be. She grabs him and steers him to her room so he can sleep off his drunken impulse. The only problem is that when they emerge in the morning, their friends and family think they’ve hooked up.

Marcela and Theo shrug it off. Hey, they’re lonely and they both need a date for the wedding, so maybe if they fake a relationship for long enough they’ll have a good cover for their feelings for the bride and groom. Fake dating after a fake drunken hook-up, though, leads to a real drunken hook- up. Surely they can keep things purely physical? And if they can’t, can they let go of Ben and Alice and find real love with each other?

I had a few problems with The Next Best Fling. At least one of them is due to the fact the heroine is crushing on a guy who refuses to acknowledge her worth and has not done so for a good eight years. And while it’s good that Theo and Marcela know their crushes aren’t healthy and are in fact holding them back from getting where and what they really want out of life, it also takes them both forever to disengage from Ben and Alice. The burn is a slow one as they waddle through their denial toward real love, and for some readers it’s going to take way too long for them to get to that point.

I liked Marcella and her absolute true love of being a librarian; the plus-size rep here is also stellar, and I liked that Theo has a sweetness to him on top of it all. The romance builds realistically and I wanted Marcella and Theo to wake up and get it together already.

What isn’t realistic is what happens with Ben, the plot twisting him until…well, you’ll see.

The Next Best Fling is a big, messy romantic drama. The central romance is sweet, the hero and heroine lovable, but too much focus is pulled from it by the crushes they have on others to make it fully credible. I definitely enjoyed it, but I can’t quite give it a wholehearted recommendation.

This was such a cute read! I really enjoyed the love story that was developed between Marcela and Theo. Firstly, fake dating is one of my favorite because it leads to killer tension moments, and we did not miss out on those in this one. Secondly, the TWIST with Theo’s brother/Marcela’s “love” was just something I did not see coming, and honestly was kind of sad? But it really did fit Theo and Marcela’s love story. Finally, the SPICE was so good. I loved having a plus sized FMC (which I really relate to) experiencing so many moments that we only ever really see in stories about skinnier FMCs. The on thing I didn’t love, though, was the third act breakup bits, even if it wasn’t truly a third act breakup. Just generally not my favorite part of a story.

Thank you to NetGalley and Forever (Grand Central Publishing) for this arc in exchange for an honest review.

Rounded up from a 3.5

Who wants to read about a love triangle when you can read about a love square!

Marcela has been in love with her best friend, Ben, for years now; the only problem is that he is about to propose to his long-term girlfriend, Alice. Enter Theo, Ben’s older brother who has been in love with Alice since childhood. When Marcela finds Theo pacing around and practicing a speech at Alice and Ben’s engagement party, professing his love for her, she knows she has to step in and stop him from causing a scene. After leaving the party together and showing up to a family brunch together the next morning, Marcela and Theo now find themselves in a fake relationship of sorts and continue the ruse so that they can get over their respective feelings for the future bride and groom.

I loved the setup of this so much! Like I knew it was bound to be messy and it delivered on that. Marcela and Theo’s relationship evolved so naturally to me and I loved how they gave each other the space to open up to one another about everything and anything. Theo is such a sweetheart and he falls so hard for Marcela! He did so many little things along the way that just made me swoon (kissing her knuckles when he held her hands, participating in her library’s teen book club, buying her favorite books, and more).

I do wish we would have been able to see more of Theo’s professional life, he’s a recently retired football player because at times I felt like his profession could have been anything else and the story would pretty much be the same. And I do understand that football and his injuries played a huge part in the brotherly dynamics between him and Ben. I just wish we saw more of it firsthand on the page.

Overall it was a very quick and easy read and I will read more by this author in the future.

rep: plus size latina
cw: abandonment, emotional abuse, toxic friendship, fatphobia, body shaming, injury

4 Stars

The premise for this book was such a fun one! Two love interests who have been pinning over people they couldn’t have, an engaged couple, finding one another. While there were a couple of tropes featured in this book that I am not a huge fan of, like third act breakup and lying, I flew through this book because I loved the MMC; THEO!! He was so bomb, like the gold standard!

thank you to netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an e-arc in exchange for an honest review!

this was a miss for me. i was really excited about it because it was about a librarian, marcela, who falls in love with her best friends brother, theo. but there were too many aspects of the book that i didn't enjoy that disappointed me overall.

marcela is the epitome of the 'not like other girls' trope and i couldn't handle it. she acted very immature and juvenile for her age. that fact that she was pining for almost a decade over a man who was in a relationship but also a complete asshole? girl GET UP. i couldn't believe that she remained friends with (and fell for) a manipulative narcissist for most of her adult life. girl.

from the get go, theo had no personality. he literally spoke to her in "grunts"??? and he was also pining after his childhood friend for years. like what???? aside from that it was obvious that he definitely had alcohol problems. most of the book he was drunk, she was, or they both were. there was instalove between them but zero chemistry. they were brought together by circumstance but didn't actually fit each other's personalities.

the drama and the conversations were annoying. the amount of miscommunication made me roll my eyes multiple times. the plot keping going on and on in circles, repeating itself until i honestly almost dnf'd the book lol. i really did enjoy the plus size rep in this and the fact that marcela was a librarian!

Thank you to NetGalley & Gabriella Gamez for an ARC copy of this book in exchange for a review!

The Next Best Fling was an absolute rollercoaster - our two main characters are fighting unrequited love… and use each other to do it! Our MCs are a curvy librarian girly + an ex NFL player to boot 😍

The events of this book were like a tele-novella - love triangles (squares?), daddy issues, sibling drama, and not quite getting over exes. I enjoyed reading it a lot!

This book releases on July 9th, so be sure to give it a read!!