YES YES YES 1000X yes!!!

Thank you to Maisey Yates, Amazon Publishing and NetGalley for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

I went into this book not really knowing what to fully expect and I was SO SO happily surprised! I finished this book in less than 24 hours (which as a Mom of 7 small kids that is a feat in itself!)

I absolutely LOVED the story between Amelia and Nathan. Everything from the tension, the banter, the spice - it was perfect!

While some reviewers didn't care for the "trauma dumping" it was one of my favourite aspects of the book. It made the characters so much more real and relatable. These are real life types of losses and grief processes that people go through daily. Seeing it on paper in the main steam book world makes loss and grief a less taboo topic and gives those dealing with grief a safe place to share their story and journey to healing. 10/10!

Ok, and can we just talk about how absolutely wonderful the older residents of the motel are? I am in LOVE with every single on of them! They were giving off the perfect protective grandparents full of loving wisdom - such a wonderful addition to the typical character line up in their 20's and 30's!

Looking forward to reading more by Maisey in the future!

Maisey Yates delivers a unique and creative take on the romance genre with Happy After All. The book is a quirky blend of storytelling and self-reflection, written as if the author's life were a romance novel. Each chapter delves into a different romance trope, giving readers a broad spectrum of love's highs and lows. Yates skillfully weaves themes of love, loss, tragedy, fear, the importance of chosen family, rebirth, and the hope of a happily ever after (HEA). The storyline is engaging and filled with heartfelt moments, though it doesn't shy away from heartbreak and emotional depth.

While the concept and story arc were enjoyable, one aspect detracted from the overall experience. Yates frequently uses uncommon or complex vocabulary, which disrupted the flow of reading. If not for the ease of looking up words on a Kindle, this would have been even more frustrating. For a book meant to be enjoyed leisurely, the constant need for a vocabulary lesson diminished the escapism and became a source of annoyance.

Despite this, Happy After All remains a well-crafted and emotional journey. For readers who enjoy both romance and a touch of linguistic challenge, it may be a perfect fit. For others, it might require a bit more patience.

A wonderful story with excellent characters and one that has many different emotions as well. Begins with Amelia who has left L.A. and has moved to a small desert town near Joshua Tree National Park. She has bought a Pink hotel and is in the process of fixing it up when she has a man check-in. he is Nathan, and he does not talk or partake in the activities that she offers. He arrives each summer for the next two years each time reserving the same room. Slowly he becomes more involved because of the ladies who live there. Also, he and Amelia slowly begin to reveal each of their stories to each other. This is part of the emotions of loss and working at moving on having lost a daughter, granddaughter, and wife having a miscarriage when we were younger I could relate to many of the emotions and the work at needing to move on. Here though is a wonderful story of loss, finding friends, and a new home and people who will support you. A very good book and very much worth the read.

Amelia and Nathan are both writers living out so many romance tropes. While it starts like a light enemies-to-lovers story, things take a turn and they both start realizing how similar their losses are—there's an intensity in their understanding of each other's grief.

I wish I was more invested in the romantic aspects of this story but where I fell in love with Happy After All by Maisey Yates was in the other kinds of love we experience here: platonic, familial, and, in small bits, the self-kind.

There's so much pain and hurt here. There are years of feeling inadequate and broken, but then, our characters finally talk about their feelings and experiences and move through them. The way this community comes together in tragedy and uplifts each other was so incredibly heartwarming.

What really got me though was how the women at the motel were able to tell exactly what Amelia was going through just by looking at her. Because, in the end, everyone there experienced heartbreak, so they all knew what it looked like. This book truly shined in its secondary characters.

This was my first Maisey Yates book and I will be reading more from her. I thought this book was very well written and the characters were very relatable in their trauma. With that being said I wish there had been a trigger warning of child loss because I would have avoided that part of the book as it’s a trigger for me.

I still enjoyed their story and would recommend it for others as it showed how to overcome your past and learn to love again.

3.5⭐, 2🌶️

This book has it's pro's and its con's but overall I liked it - I wasn't drawn to pick it up (listen) and binge it, but when I listened, I really liked it. I like that this is a small town, found family book of two people both drowning in their grief (both dealing with deaths of loved ones: TW: spouse death due to cancer, and late term miscarriage) and they bring each other strength in a lovely way. I just want to hug Amelia and Nathan. The inner monologues ran a bit too long for me (I think it dragged the story for me) and once these to start their "benefits" relationship, the storyline just kind of flatlined for me and wasn't super exciting.

This book also has a plot line of the community being ravaged by a wildfire - listening to this while the California fires burn so many communities added unexpected emotions for me.

Thank you Netgalley and Montlake for an eARC of this book in exchange for my honest and unpaid review!

Amelia runs a desert motel, and Nathan comes to stay for the summer a few years in a row. He is a writer (so is Amelia) but he is working on a project not in his typical genre. He stays to himself, but there are sparks. Amelia has guests who live in the motel year-round, and they have a cute sense of community. There is some sadness to this book, a late term pregnancy loss & the loss of a beloved spouse. It is deeper than I expected, but a good read. I received an advanced reader copy of this book from NetGalley and this is my honest review.

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⚠️‼️⚠️‼️DONT READ FURTHER IF YOURE INTENDING TO READ AS I DISCUSS THE WHOLE PLOT.
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this book exceeded my expectations!!! having read a cowboy christmas and loved the writing style, i was excited to apply for an arc by the same author! this book is about amelia and nathan. amelia leaves her life to buy a ranch style motel and puts her all into reconstruction and building herself a new life. nathan is an author under a pseudonym and books a festive stay at the hotel to write in room 32. he checks in again the year after and they are put together by the older ladies at the motel when they fake needing assistance. amelia starts to fall for nathan but he is so emotionally unavailable. she then sees he’s booked to stay in the summer which is unlike him. they end up hooking up but under the guise of a physical relationship only. amelia then hosts a christmas fundraiser after a horrific fire tears through the town and she ends up hosting multiple families at the motel. they come together as a community and even nathan mucks in to help. at the christmas fundraiser amelia finds out her ex will be visiting as an actor they originally hired couldn’t make it. they didn’t end on good terms and you find out amelia lost their baby 3 days before their due date. she couldn’t handle the loss and he wasn’t willing to and just wanted to move on then he cheated on her causing her to flee and build a new life. amelia’s becomes tired of running away. she is also falling for nathan and after several hookups and not dates, they confide in each other about their trauma. amelia tells nathan about her daughter emma and he reveals he had a wife who tragically passed away. they get through the charity event and amelia has an epiphany; she no longer holds feelings towards chris her actor ex and she wants to tell nathan how she feels about him. he is blinded with grief and doesn’t want to work through heartache a second time. he leaves the motel early and leaves amelia after her confession. then as she is in his empty room days later he appears and confesses even though he is grieving, leaving her won’t make it any better so they kiss and have their hea. amelia’s friend and colleague elise also finally gets with her love interest ben. the bonus epilogue reveals amelia and nathan get married surrounded by their friends and family they’ve made at rancho encanto.
such a lovely story and i loved how amelia went for what she believed in. i also love the subplot of her realising she couldn’t repair the relationship she didn’t have with her mother after amelia and nathan take a drive back to her hometown of bakersfield. amelia realizes she can’t help her mother and anything she would’ve says would’ve been turned on her as she never cared for her.
also love at the charity event that nathan and chris were bidding over amelia’s decorated tree and nathan spent 10k on it as a grand gesture.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing an ebook in exchange for an honest review. I absolutely adored Happy After All. Based on the cover and blurb, I was expecting a light contemporary romance, possibly featuring a grumpy/sunshine dynamic. However, what I found was much deeper and more poignant than I anticipated—a story about two people navigating grief and loss, yet still choosing to embrace happiness and love.

One of the things I loved most about this book was the emphasis on found family. The importance of female friendships and bonds played a central role in the healing journey of the main character, Amelia. In many ways, this story is as much about finding yourself through supportive relationships as it is about romantic love. The older female characters, in particular, offered Amelia wisdom and advice that I found myself highlighting and rereading. Their words were powerful and resonated deeply.

Though the book touches on some painful topics, it manages to maintain an uplifting tone that prevents it from feeling overly heavy. This emotional depth caught me off guard in the best way possible. It’s a contemporary romance, yes, but it’s also a heartfelt exploration of personal growth and the strength found in community and friendship.

If I had one critique, it would be that the book starts off a bit slow, and could even be considered a slow burn. However, once Nathan's past is revealed later on, the pacing makes sense, and I appreciated how it set the stage for the deeper connection between the characters.

In conclusion, Happy After All is a standout read that I highly recommend. It has all the great hallmarks of a contemporary romance, but with an emotional punch that leaves the reader feeling both achy and satisfied. A perfect balance of heart and depth.

Such a neat premise, being that it takes place at a PINK hotel - I mean come on! But the storyline was so… not it. Slow, then fast, drones, then sulks. The relationship between Amelia & Nathan felt super, duper forced… and I just really struggled to make the connection between the two. Besides that, a book I’d expect to be happy-go-lucky would be this one with the cover and premise (I know, I know, don’t judge a book by its cover… but I do), it was very full of sad moments. Grief was important to note in this story, but it shouldn’t have been the ENTIRE storyline. Thanks for the opportunity to read.

Wow - this was a different read. Starts out like a Hallmark rom-com movie, and even mentions the Hallmark style a ton -- but then it turns and gets really heavy with grief and feeling broken.

It has a good concept and I really wanted to enjoy it more. I love the cheesie pink flamingo motel setting, the dive-in movies and the family of interesting characters that live in the motel. I was pulling for the MC, Amelia ran away from her broken life and ex to run the motel and Nathan is trying to get over his wife's death. It's way too wordy, like 100 pages too long and I started to lose interest in the middle.

Thank you to NetGalley, the author and publisher for a temporary digital ARC in return for my review.

I really, really, enjoyed this. It was like a picture of what a romance writer would write while someone is falling in love. The main character is a romance author, but also runs a wonderfully quirky hotel with quirky guest. The hero is a moody, tragic figure. Together they find some joy after experiencing so much tragedy. It really was a wonderful book! Great first read of the year!

How could a book this cute make me cry so much?!?!?!?

Amelia leaves LA to start over in a small, desert town running a motel while she writes romance novels. Her life is fine until Nathan walks into the lobby to check in. He's grumpy and reclusive and completely her type of tortured romance hero. But her gorgeous guest is off limits. He comes back every summer for three years like clockwork, and then shows up for the month of December, just as her life is about go get messy. Her ex is coming to town for a charity event and Amelia isn't sure she can face him. Is Nathan just the distraction she needs?

Read if you like:
-Starting Over
-Not Taking Yourself Too Seriously
-Grief
-Just Once to Oops we're in Love
-Figuring it Out Together
-Found Family

I loved that both Amelia and this book didn't take itself too seriously and that both leaned into classic romance novel tropes in a way that toed the line of breaking the fourth wall. It was very clever and tongue in cheek. I was so caught up in how cute it was that the emotions and grief caught me off guard. I was crying my way through the last quarter of the book in the best way. It was so raw and so real, made all the better for the humor.

Amelia left Los Angeles after a bad breakup. She ends up in Rancho Encanto because she found a real estate listing for a hotel for sale. Owning the hotel gives her time to spend time writing romance books. She becomes part of the Rancho Encanto community and builds a little family with the people who live in the hotel full time. She doesn’t want romance. She just wants peace. Nathan comes to the Pink Flamingo hotel for the summer. He is standoffish and snarly. Over the next three years, Nathan returns again and again. He is on a mission and it doesn’t include romance. Maybe two broken people can help each other heal.

The author chose to write a story that takes many years to come to fruition. The slow reveal of Amelia and Nathan’s backgrounds was a slow drip punctuated by periods of getting to know the people at The Pink Flamingo. The beginning of the book was a bit slow as the author set all of the pieces into place. Then, as the characters reveal parts of their history, the story develops a heart and soul. The author did a great job developing the characters to the point that they felt real. When there is a fire in the town, I cried. When the town is working on recovering, both Amelia and Nathan reveal their secret author identities to the town to help the town raise money. I like the catalyst the author used to force Amelia to confront her past and reveal the details to Nathan. I’m not going to say exactly what made Nathan come to Rancho Encanto in the first place BUT I will say that when he reveals what is driving him and his decisions, I cried. It was just so much!

In the end, there was something that I wanted to have happen that didn’t happen. It would have made this a sappy Hallmark level romance. This author took the book in directions I didn’t expect so this particular thing missing from the end was okay. (DON’T READ THIS SPOILER: Nathan’s in-laws from his prior marriage did not attend his wedding to Amelia and that made me sad. You’ll understand when you read the book.)

This story takes place in Rancho Encanto, California (close to Bakersfield) in the desert. This is a story about two broken people healing and finding each other and a community of people that need each other. This is a stand alone novel. I don’t do this very often but….I recommend this book to anyone. Period. Yes there is a romance. But this is also a women’s fiction story. It’s also a quirky small-town story. This book has a ton of heart! I will read more from this author in the future.

I love Maisey Yates books, and while this one is a different theme from others I have read, it does not disappoint. We follow Amelia as she relocates from her life in LA to a small town, so she can start over. Watching her make a home, deal with grief and find real friendship through this journey is lovely. Her connection with Nathan is difficult and they navigate it beautifully.

Thank you netgalley for an arc of Happy After All by Maisey Yates

3.5 stars
I enjoyed this story, and how Amelia and Nathan ended up being just what each other needed. I loved the setting of the motel Amelia buys out in the desert near Palm Springs, and how it's the permanent home for a fun bunch of elderly ladies who become stand-in mother figures for her. The pink and flamingos and the Christmas/holiday event in the town were nice backdrops.
However, there were some aspects of the storytelling that I felt detracted a bit. The book is entirely from Amelia's POV, and I was yearning for at least a few chapters of Nathan's. Especially in the first half, it's so hard to tell what he's thinking or his motivations. This was probably on purpose to keep from having to divulge his background too early, but I still wanted little glimpses into his character. Many of the chapters start with a definition of a romance novel trope as a header- which in some cases was a bit of a spoiler as to a general idea of what was going to happen in that chapter. And the first few chapters jumped a year in between each of them, which felt a little chaotic when reading those. Once it settled in to the current timeline and bulk of the story, this resolved.
Also, I would not refer to the book as "funny" like the description does. It is heartfelt, but there is a lot of heavy stuff in here. I would put a content warning (some of these happened prior to the story's start, but still are significant aspects of the book as they deeply impacted characters) - cheating, death of a spouse, death of a child, narcissitic and/or absent parents, and a significant wildfire (specific caution to those in California).
Overall, it was a good book, but it is not a light romance novel.

I have never felt the way I felt when reading this book, you know when someone is nervous and they don’t stop talking or fidgeting? That’s how this book made me feel. There is a lot of words and not enough action/happening. This would have been a lovely little hallmark novella / short story if the author didn’t have a word count to reach. I was really unable to enjoy this book.

Maisey Yates’ Happy After All follows the lives of Amelia Taylor and Nathan Hart as they grapple with the ghosts of their respective pasts and discover love and what it's like to open up to each other. On the run from a cheating ex and a life she wasn't happy living, Amelia finds solace in a desert motel where she spends her days writing romance novels and tending to her guests. When Nathan Hart, famous writer and a brooding, emotionally reserved man, walks in with a reservation their lives are changed, as they struggle to not fall for each other while unearthing each other's secrets. With a vibrant cover and an opening line that hooks you in for a tumultuous romance, the story, with all its ups and downs makes for an intriguing read.

The initial emphasis on how attractive Nathan was seems amusing at first, but it soon becomes repetitive thereafter. As the story progresses and important confessions come to light, the communication between the protagonists is riddled with therapy speak, and their self-awareness and ability to rationalize major life events is almost unsettling. I adored some of the side characters, was especially invested in Elise and Ben's friendship (which could've been hyped more in my opinion) and generally appreciated the humor and warmth some of the older characters added to the story. The musings on grief, while insightful at first, become too repetitive as the story progresses, and I found the resolution hurried and lacking in whimsy. All in all I enjoyed the story, the attempt to explore loss and the characters’ efforts to rise above their grief, and the setting and pacing of the novel makes for an intriguing read. 2.5/5

I was super into this during the first 40% but then I started to feel like things got repetitive. I might’ve enjoyed it more with Nathan’s POV? I just felt like it was way too wordy and repetitive about Amelia’s reasons for being in the desert. Like I understood her pain and need to get away- I didn’t need to read paragraphs about it every single chapter.

This was pretty heavy with grief and that's not usually something I go for, I thought it wouldn't be this heavy but both main characters were dealing with significant loss. It was about grief and the journey to healing with some romance. I honestly started to skim a bit because it was getting a little repetitive after a while and so much monologuing. They were both good main characters, don't get me wrong, but I was hoping for more romance than what we got and that's just a me thing. I did love the whole community Amelia built with her motel and how supportive and fun they were.