This book had it all, romance, road trips, friendships, family, second chances, tears and fears, and I really wished it didn't have to end. When formerly inseparable best friends Nia and Jade agree to go on a road trip to honor their late friend Michal, they find themselves learning new history, reliving old history, and mourning all at once. There was such a wonderful world.build for the jewish culture as well as leading in the way of navigating the heritage as a person of color. I loved every moment of it.

Thank you to NetGalley and SMP for the ARC in exchange for an honest review

I would recommend if you're looking for (SPOILERS)

-f/f contemporary romance
-grief roadtrip
-childhood best friends to estranged to lovers
-mutual pining
-childhood crush
-slow burn
-found family
-jewish and biracial rep

Rachel Runya Katz just knows how to write friendships (and siblings, honestly rude how incredible she is at drawing dynamics with her characters). This book handles so many difficult topics, multipe timelines, and a romance, and Rachel is one of the few authors out there who can do it and do it deftly. Nia and Jade after not speaking for a few years decide to embar on the Southern Jewish roadtrip they planned with their best friend prior to her death, with Jade's twin brother tagging along. This roadtrip is packed with so much. Dealing with the grief of losing one of your closest people, how grief and relationships are different between different people, and balancing the weight of your history, and your friendship, for a romantic relationship. oh and there is the cutest dog. Add in the complexities of their roadtrip through Southern synogogues and this book is a beautiful exploration of ancestry, history, and paving your own future.

Ouch!!!! This is easily on of the most powerful books I've read in a while. How all consuming grief can be and how trying to hold on to what was after major loss to protect yourself can end up with more loss that you were trying to prevent. Jade, Jonah and Nia were all bleeding throughout the entire road trip and it felt so tangible. Tissues are required for this book, no doubt.

4.5 stars

This is a beautiful Sapphic story that weaves heavy topics in with lighthearted banter and a lovely romance.

Nia and Jade agree to finally go on the Southern Jewish road trip that they'd planned before their best friend Michal died, and they take Jade's twin Jonah and his dog along with them. Nia never told Jade she's in love with her, but that's not going to come up... right?

Throwing the reader right into the story with little explanation was a little difficult to read, but power through it because it is worth the journey. I really enjoyed the intersectionality of Jewish, POC, being multiracial, and queer that was present throughout. The grieving parts hit me hardest and had me tearing up in a café. This is a gorgeous slooow burn with flashbacks to their youth throughout. I adored the sibling banter and the emphasis on therapy to sort out issues.

Thank you to NetGalley and publisher for the opportunity to read and review!

Okay, I thoroughly enjoyed this book so damn much.

Friends to lovers has become a favorite trope of mine, and I really loved Jade and Nia’s friendship. I think the heavier themes were dealt with great care and the author did a wonderful job with them.

The super slow burn may have been just a tad too slow for me, but overall I really liked this book.

I am almost halfway through and I don’t really connect with any of the characters. I find my mind wandering and that I’m skipping over pages. This makes me sad because I enjoyed Rachel’s debut, but I cannot keep my focus on this one enough to finish. :(

Whenever You’re Ready is a delightful slow-burn romance. Nia and Jade have always been best friends, along with their friend Michal. After Michal passes away from cancer, Nia and Jade reunite after years apart to take a road trip that they all planned. As they journey through the South, they are faced with painful history and bittersweet memories. Can Nia and Jade find their way back to each other?

Whenever You’re Ready is a book about loss, friendship, and missed connections. I especially enjoyed how Rachel Runya Katz writes such depth in her characters. They feel relatable and deeply lovable. Jade and Jonah’s sibling relationship felt realistic and I liked how their individual connections to Michal were portrayed. Nia and Jade are absolutely gone for each other but can’t quite realize this before the trip. The aspects of grief, anticipatory grief, and loss really hit hard for me. I also learned a lot about what it was like to be Jewish in the South, both historically and presently. This is a very important topic and period of time that is integral to the story.

Whenever You’re Ready is a beautiful and heartfelt book about friendship, love, and searching for connection. Readers who enjoy slow-burn sapphic romance and friends-to-lovers should check out Whenever You’re Ready.

Thank you to Rachel Runya Katz, St. Martin’s Griffin, and NetGalley for a free ARC in exchange for an honest review.

For publisher: My review will be posted on Goodreads, Amazon, Storygraph, and Barnes & Noble etc.

This is a grief-ridden but very heartwarming friends-to-lovers romance. It deals with a lot of different themes - grief, complex family dynamics, racial identities, religious undertones, etc., but still manages to strike a balance to make this book light enough to be a great romance.

The characters are all flawed but lovable, and feel remarkably realistic - all of their personalities and conflicts feel very true-to-life, and it’s impossible not to get sucked into the story right away.

There’s also a lot of history woven into the story, and I came away with a deeper understanding of some complexities of different ethnic backgrounds and cultures.

I definitely recommend picking this up and giving it a read!

Rachel Runya Katz writes complex characters and stories in a way that is so impressive to me. Their ability is on full display here, taking the authentic messiness of human nature and stitching together a slow-burn love that is as complicated throughout as it is heartwarming in the end. My feelings were so conflicted the entire time I was reading, and as I wrapped up my reading journey I knew it was because I was absorbing what the characters were feeling and trying to process it with them.

Nia, Jade, and Jonah are all grieving the same loss of Michal but in vastly different ways. Nia and Jade are also navigating a massive strain on their friendship that is complicated by feelings - both realized (Nia) and being denied (Jade). Jade and Jonah have a challenging twin sibling relationship that is eventually destined to come to a head with conversations that need to be had. All of this happens while on a road trip exploring their Jewish ancestry in the South, which is, unsurprisingly, also complicated and emotionally charged. Have I mentioned this book is complex?

Everything unfolds in a path full of ebbs and flows, avoidance and breaking points, loss and love, and ultimately hope and healing. It was a challenge to get there, at times daunting and wondering when things are going to snap, but by the end I was left feeling like the journey was without a doubt worth the ride.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Griffin for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.

I had to put this book down because the subject matter hit a little too close to home and made reading it difficult, which was disappointing because I was all in for the sapphic and Jewish rep. That's no criticism of the book or the author, rather a compliment that Katz did her job well. I hope to pick it up again and finish in the future. In the meantime, I'm giving Katz high marks because she certainly succeeded in making me feel things!

As with her lovely debut, Thank You for Sharing, Katz gives us a complex set of relationships, examining what tears us apart, and what keeps us together, and how the two aren’t always mutually exclusive, especially when trauma comes in to play. Here we have two close friends who’ve been deeply in love with each other since childhood but who’ve become estranged after an emotionally charged fight shortly after their mutual best friend died. After years of silence, they embark on a week-long road trip together that was part of their deceased friend’s unfinished bucket list. Along for the ride is one friend’s brother, who was dating the friend they all lost. As the trio examines their history—both personal and generational—they’re forced to reckon with everything that hasn’t been said, and how they might use their past to help them build the futures they want. I loved the complexities of the personal and generational histories. Nothing was oversimplified. I loved the dog, who added a bright note of humour to a story that digs into a lot of tough material. I loved the emotional access Katz built for the reader, so we felt the characters’ yearning, their inner conflict, their fury, their confusion, and at last, at the perfect moment, their whole-hearted joy.

While this one was a beautiful story and I did love it, there were times I didn't feel myself drawn to it the way I was with Rachel's last book. That's not to say it wasn't utterly delightful. Nia and Jade were lovely and their romance was so sweet. It was definitely a slow burn and I think part of my problem was that it came together so quickly after so much slow burn. This had some very heavy topics, but Rachel handled them so beautifully and if you can emotionally handle it, this book is definitely worth the time.

The other thing I had difficulty with was following that the POVs could switch multiple times within a chapter. Once I got the pattern, it became easier to understand, but it did throw me off a little.

Thank you to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Nia and Jade!!!!!! This book packs HEAVY! These two have so much history, and the slow burn is PROOF. These two have so much history and the things they have gone through, together and against the world gave me the feels, I was so emotional. I liked it, wish it was not such a slow burn.

Thank you to SMP Romance for the advanced reader copy. These opinions are my own.

Wow! I am again blown away by the depth of Rachel Runya Katz's writing.

I do want to start by saying this is a challenging topic. The book focuses on three best friends from childhood, Michal, Nia, and Jade. But Michal died of cancer three years ago. In the present, Nia and Jade take a road trip with Jade's twin brother, Jonah.

The book digs into some tough aspects. The grief for all three and how they process it and how it is acknowledged or not by others is a huge theme.

And their road trip is similarly heavy hitting. It's a Southern Jewish history trip, and they look at the legacies of racism, slavery, and the civil rights movement. The author's note encouraged me to learn more about aspects of history that certainly were not covered in my schools.

But the book also incorporated other aspects that created a lovely story and romance. This book shows just how deep the bonds of friendship can go. And I appreciated all of the different types of love we see on the page. The gender and sexuality representation were beautifully incorporated. The steamy scenes were lovely. And the romance felt so deep and nuanced.

This is one I recommend for when you're in the mood to go deep.

CW: cancer, grief, death of a friend

4.5 stars rounded up

A gentle slow burn friends to lovers road trip novel that takes on grief, racism and antisemitism as well as homophobia in a way that never feels too much. Nia and Jade, along with Michal, were BFFs until Michal died and things imploded. Now, though, they're on a Southern Jewish heritage road trip along with Jade's brother Jonah. All three have unresolved issues about Michal, and there's a longing that hangs over Nia and Jade. This has lovely characters and thoughtful plotting but it's the storytelling that amps it up. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. A very good read.

This story, while having lighthearted moments, does have a pretty serious setting and purpose for the story. I think the author noted them appropriately in a warning page, and that is something I appreciated as a mood reader. There's parts of history mentioned that can be a bit uncomfortable in grappling with what has happened in the past. However, it is still important to recognize and hopefully past wrongs can be corrected in an appropriate way. This is a complex story, with multiple relationships, and to me it really emphasized how messy life can be. The characters struggle with the loss of their friend that connected them, and that is really the background for the whole book. It illustrates how imperfect relationships can be and that there's a choice to right your wrongs, apologize, and work towards being better. It talks about accountability, all without a "holier-than-thou" attitude. This book is absolutely worth a read, but important to also be gentle with yourself based on the author notes.

This just didn’t work for me at all.

We’re thrown straight in with these characters in a way that made me feel like I was missing something, like I was reading a sequel and didn’t have all the pieces.

The changing POV in the middle of chapters with no warning was something I found really jarring while reading, too.

I felt no real chemistry between our main characters. I love a slow burn but this didn’t focus enough on the relationship for me.

A road trip to fulfill a promise to a friend who has passed away, uncovers secrets among three friends.

I’m going to start with the road trip itself because I learned so much. United States history is not pretty and Rachel Runya Katz does not shy away from it. The trio are on a Jewish History tour of historic sites in Georgia and North Carolina. History can be painful and it is here. Never mind, the automatic assumptions of what people think races look like and that everyone experiences culture in the same way. The characters feel the pain of the past as if the ghosting intersectionality has burst from their own bones. How the history they think they know and what they see is jarring and can still scar. I just loved this whole part of the book, not for the pain caused but for the history I didn’t know.

The other major storyline is about friendship. The friendship between three women and a male twin sibling. I wrote it this way purposefully because of how Jonah feels amidst this group and the secrets that come out. Katz moves back and forth from the past to the present to bring more context to experiences. It works and doesn’t feel awkward.

Amidst all of the drama, there is a romance. Unrequited love can be debilitating and affect how you react to situations. This is the case with both Nia and Jade. The chemistry is there, but honesty is not. More drama (chuckle).

This is a heavy read. It’s about the loss of a close friend and lover and how no one has moved on. Get some cookies or whatever comfort food you need and get ready to sink into history, both personal and historical.

Whenever You're Ready largely takes place largely over and emotionally wrought road trip Jade and Nia planned with their deceased best friend, Michal. The addition of Jade’s twin brother (and Michal’s ex) Jonah, adds complications, and the addition of the twins’ dog Luna, adds delight. This was between a 3 and a 4 star read for me, rounding up because I think this tackles some important topics.

Fantastically written sapphic romance.
Super slow burn, complicated friends to lovers when the other friend always knew, and filled with so much grief. Love and sadness and friendship at its center, this is a great read.

I thoroughly enjoyed the complexities and exploration into the lives of Jade, Nia & Jonah all because of Michal's letter requesting they take the southern Jewish history road trip they had planned before her passing.