I found this story to be very addicting and I read the book very quickly. A lot of sports romances don't feature enough of the sport, and I think that Juniper does that really well here. I am a casual fan of F1 who doesn't get into the mechanical aspect a whole lot, but I think there was just enough to be exciting for people who are fans of the sport. While also having explanation enough for people with no knowledge to be interested without going overboard.

The relationship development was a little fast, but I think it matched well to the high energy of both characters as well as the high-stakes environment they're in. The dual POV is definitely part of what makes this story, I love a down bad MMC. The pass from tension to benefits and benefits to relationship was pretty smooth. But there's a part where they move into love that I think the story would have better been served without.

This does read like a debut novel to me, I think it would have been a little better served to include less tropes and focus on giving more time to the ones that it did have. I'm very excited to read the author's future works.

A chore to read - the MFC is terrible, the dialogue is ridiculous, and life is too short to read books that don’t work for me. And this really didn’t work for me. Again, the MFC is absolutely horrible.

I can’t recommend this one.



Thank you to Forever and NetGalley for the DRC

Quick and entertaining read. It was alternating perspectives but the voices didn’t feel distinct enough. The story was interesting and good spice, but I probably won’t find myself thinking about it again in the future.
FMC was slightly unlikeable at times, and the romance progressed in a weirdly fast way that didn’t really fit with the persona of the MMC. There wasn’t enough explaining as to why the sudden shift.

DNF - While the concept seemed interesting, the actual story, and writing-craft, lacked.

I absolutely could not stand Phaedra. She read NLOG and for being in her 30s, acted like a 16 year old. She was mean to everyone for no reason and lacked character growth. With all of that, I never came to care for her, nor her HEA.

Cosmin was not it for me either as sexual-harassment in the workplace isn't sexy!!! I understand that this is a workplace romance, but those can be done by skirting the line of harassment and this was not it.

The book needs needs another pass over with an editor for flow and cringy dialogue.

This book was cute and easy to read. Honestly, I didn’t love the FMC but I did like the MMC. The women in stem/male dominated field is always a hit for me so that was great.

Double Apex came out swinging with the banter and I ate it up.
Cos had me giggling and kicking my feet from the very first page. He was so sweet and patient with Phae, it was so refreshing.
Phae had some struggles, and I’m glad it was talked about on the page because some conversations between Phae and every other character were rough.
Overall, this has only fueled my fire for a newfound love of Formula 1.

I wanted to like this book so badly.
Thank you to Netgalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

What I liked

• The concept is so good! I love a good workplace rivals to lovers and women in STEM always get me.
• The cover is so cute I love this cover artist.
• The Male main character is adorable. He's kinda written as a womanizer but I really don't see it? His parts of the book are by far my favorite ones. And I do feel he has some growth as a character.
• The side characters! I found them to be interesting and fun.

What I didn't like
• The female main character. She's so mean for no reason. I felt like there was no growth with her. Everyone claims the MMC was a cocky playboy but I really think she was the one with an Ego on her. It was giving me "I'm too pretty and smart for these problems I keep having". It made it really hard to relate to her and I wasn't invested in her success. It really ruined this story for me. There was also a smidge of what could be viewed as domestic violence in this book perpetrated by her that was just absolutely foul.
• The writing was good at times but I definitely felt it could use a few more passes with an editor. There was some scenes that left me cringing. The bones were there, and the plot definitely flowed in a way that made sense. I just feel like it needed some more. And i also feel at times that there was nothing happening and then two chapters later there was too much happening. There was also a language barrier that kinda made things seem a bit awkward instead of charming "are you fertile" instead of "are you on birth control"

Overall a swing and a miss. I love F1 romances but this one just had too unlikeable a female character for me to be truly invested.

Double Apex by Josie Juniper was a great, fun read. I'm very much a fan of Formula 1 and I've been enjoying all these new F1 romances but I do find it kind of annoying when you can see that the authors don't know a lot about it and it takes me out BUT this one delivered. You can tell that Juniper is a fan of Formula 1 and knows what she's talking about. It felt real. The romance was spicy and lovely. It was definitely an enjoyable read. I cannot wait for everyone looking for a fun sports romance to pick this up!

Double Apex
⭐️⭐️⭐️.5/5
Pub Date: October 8th 2024

Hot, spicy and F1 racy (as someone who doesn’t know a lot about the racing world it felt very realistic) had me blushing and ready to cross the finish line.
Double Apex is a fast pace, banter from page 1 book about our FMC Phaedra who is a race engineer, but also happens to be the daughter of the team owner. Along comes newly hired flirty hot shot driver Cosmin who is in it to win, both on the track and off. What takes place when race engineer and driver need to improve their communication that actually turns into a sexy secret arrangement?

This was my first novel by Josie Juniper, but I really enjoyed it and would be interested in reading the next book in this series.

Tropes:

🏎️Workplace romance
🏎️He falls first
🏎️Grumpy/sunshine
🏎️Dual POV
🏎️Enemies to Lovers
🏎️Female STEM rep


Thank you net galley for the ARC

Women is stem will always be famous!
I just adored reading about our math genious Phaedra. She was such a fun character to read. And Cosmin was perfect match for her.
I just love the micro trope of the guy falling first and pining for the girl and this TOTALLY SERVED IT

Highly recommend!!

I love Formula 1, so I really enjoyed being immersed in that world. There was a lot of technical talk about the sport and you could tell that the author is also a fan and has done her research. This was a pro in my opinion, but if you go into this book solely for the romance, you might find the sports-talk boring.

The romance was not personally my favorite, as I was not attached to either of the main characters, and I found some of the side characters unlikable as well. However, I did think there were a lot of funny lines, and these kept pulling me back into the story. I was also more invested in the second half of the book, when the author starts addressing some heavier topics. This shift made the characters more likable and the story stronger.

Overall, I loved being in the F1 world and I laughed a lot, but I was not as invested in the characters or romance as I had hoped. Thank you NetGalley for the ARC!

Workplace romance set in a racing world with a STEM FMC? I was so completely hooked with this premise, and excited to start this book. I really wanted to like it and I was ok with the cheesy language often used by the MC even though she's supposed to be a millenial in her 30s and using words like "whatevs" in a professional setting unironically, which kind of threw me out of the story, but then we got to the MMC.

If you're a fan of alpha-hole MMCs, then this book might be for you. But for me personally, sexual harassment is never cute, never funny and makes for a pretty irredeemable love interest. Add that to the cringe-worthy dialogue in the spicy scenes, I was fighting my way through to finish this book.

I appreciated the side plots that allowed the characters to have a little more depth (FMC's father's illness, and the more charitable & heart warming side of the MMC) but this just wasn't for me.

Thank you to NetGalley & the publisher for this ARC to review.

DNF at 44%
-
Thank you to Forever for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Unfortunately, this was not for me. I personally enjoy the start quite a bit. The story follows a woman in a male dominated field? SIGN ME UP. I love that sort of thing. The dynamic between the two main characters was enjoyable though I can see other readers not being able to overlook some of the comments being thrown by the MMC. The relationship was then thrown together pretty quickly after that and it felt like a lot of the initial bonding was off the page which I personally really don't enjoy when I am supposed to be invested in a couple. It got gradually less enjoyable after the first intimate scene was quite interesting in some of the word choices and overall descriptions. To be quite frank, some of the chosen sentences really took me out of the scene because it just felt so odd and unrealistic. Outside of that, the fmc is slightly "unlikeable" which again I tend to like but there were some elements I started to resent. It felt like a lot of her ongoing issues where supposed to excusable because of the things going on in her personal life but even still..she was very judgmental to her closest friend and then turns around begging her to come back. I had anticipated this release and ran when I saw it was on read now but not for me.

dnf @ 25% (page 92)

——

life is way too short for me to read more than a quarter of this book. i was so excited as well, i love sports romance! and a female engineer main character?! love that! but unfortunately the execution was not there.

phaedra is horrible. i really couldn’t stand her, she was whiny and mean and so inconsistent. she was also incredibly judgemental particularly about intelligence and yeah, not a fan. she also does not read like a 30-something year old woman. at all.

didn’t like cosmin either, the sexist comments weren’t it. admittedly he’s not the only male character being misogynistic (ugh), but as the hero of the book, what the hell?! and his backstory felt to me like it was basically added for the shock value, which i did not appreciate with a topic like that.

and then i did not believe in even the potential of a relationship between these two characters, i don’t see the chemistry and don’t understand how either of them could be liked by the other.

so much of the writing was just odd as well. in particular cosmin’s descriptions of phaedra were especially weird, they honestly just confused me. generally this writing style was really not a favourite for me - and clearly nor was any of the rest of this book.

🏎️ Double Apex by Josie Juniper 🏎️

Out on October 8 from Forever
Phaedra Morgan is set to inherit the Emerald Racing F1 team from her father after proving herself as a top notch race engineer. The team’s star driver, Cosmin Ardelean, is a Romanian racer with a bad reputation as an unrepentant ladies man. Cosmin and Phaedra deeply dislike each other but she’s unwilling to let anything stand in the way of getting race points for Emerald. When their boss sends them to Santorini to figure out a way to get along, Phaedra and Cosmin find out there’s more than what’s on the surface to each of them.

I started out really disliking Cosmin in his first pov chapter but he really grew on me. By the end I loved him and was really rooting for Phae to get her act together. I loved the slightly antagonistic banter between Cosmin and Phae, but I loved it even more when they moved on to seeet talking each other in Romanian.

The one thing I really would’ve enjoyed here that was missing to me was an epilogue. I would’ve been happy to have more of Cosmin and Phae’s reconciliation. The ending felt a little bit abrupt to me. Otherwise I really enjoyed this and recommend to romance readers, especially those interested in F1!

3.5 stars

This was my first foray into F1 romance and it was pretty decent! I enjoyed the dual POV between Phaedra and Cosmin - Cosmin was definitely my fave with his cute little Romanian phrases. Phaedra honestly wasn’t always the most likable of characters, but I did appreciate that she was a strong + intelligent woman working in a male-dominated field.

The romance was sort of a one sided hate to love + guy falls first which is always a favorite trope of mine. There was also some dealing with grief and past trauma which gave the story a more emotional feel. While I enjoyed this story, I wasn’t a huge fan of the characters the next book is about so I’m not sure I’ll continue.

Thank you to Forever for the ARC!

3.5 stars

As someone who has recently fallen in love with STEMinist lit - Double Apex by Josie Juniper was intriguing to me. I remember watching Formula 1 races with my high school boyfriend & thought it was so cool to have a female racing engineer in a male-dominated industry.

The father-daughter relationship in this book was heartwarming - I felt a pain in my heart as Phaedra witnessed the decline in her dad’s health. I’m a daddy’s girl for sure so this got me right in the feels.

I found myself favoring the MMC “Formula 1 Fuckboy” Cosmin over the FMC Phaedra. I appreciated having the dual POV and traveling from place to place with the two of them amidst the races. I think having a deeper back story and more time learning about the complexities of each character would have helped me. I think this book was a bit too instalove for an enemies to lovers trope….however, I will admit that my favorite parts of the book were the spicy bits & there were some moments that made me laugh out loud.

Thank you to NetGalley & Grand Central Publishing for the ARC in exchange for my review. I would check out more from Josie Juniper, but I’m not sure I’m invested in keeping up with the series.

from the start the dialogue is a little bit stilted (aside from cosmin speaking romanian), and i’m not really feeling the chemistry between the main characters. they went from antagonizing each other while he’s clearly cruising for women to some weird forbidden insta love hookup situation. there is a lot of telling vs. showing on top of all that. the story has potential, but i think it needs a not insignificant amount of work in the first 45% to get there.

after the 50% mark it seemed to get a bit better. by the last 25% i was enjoying the story a bit more, and was glad that i stuck with it. the ending seemed a bit abrupt and the thing cosmin alluded to was a little sudden considering they’d just reunited after several months apart. that may have been better in an epilogue or with a few more pages included.

overall, i’d give it ⭐️⭐️⭐️ and hope that it is more polished by the publication date.

Wow I am so in love with this Formula 1 romance! It not only dove into so many of the details behind F1, but the main characters were a driver and an engineer which was just perfect! I was invested in these characters from the very start and even though Phaedra had her issues with trust and commitment, it didn’t make me like her any less! and Cosmin was absolute perfection. Nothing about him ever needs to change 🫡🫶🏼 and I’m officially obsessed.

would 100% recommend for the F1 romance readers 🤌🏼📖

I DNfd this book. I couldn’t handle the MMC and the sex scene. It was beyond cringy and I couldn’t handle it.