Thank you for providing me an eARC in exchange for a honest review.

Unfortunately, this was a DNF for me. I found the writing subpar and the lack of nuance, bad dialogue and underdeveloped character grated on me endlessly. I could not continue.

This was not what I expected. It took a while to finish this book. I really wanted to like this book but felt meh at the end.

Thank you NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

I wasn’t the biggest fan of this story only because it is not usually the kind of book that I gravitate towards. The writing was fine but the characters didn’t really impress me much. Thank you to NetGalley for the chance to read!

Amazing book! I really loved her journey through her character arc and I’m looking forward to seeing this come to the screen! Bravo!

Quick, fun summer read! The girl next door vibes! Fast paced & flirty! I quite loved it! I had to know what was going to happen and where her heart was going to fall. I loved how it ended with her ultimately choosing herself.

I really don't know how to describe my feelings about this book.

First of all, I have no idea who Tinx is, nor do I want to. But if this book is modeled after her, she did not do herself a lot of favors.

Our main character Lola is a fashion influencer; she started out posting her own vintage designs but has morphed into shilling anything from her sponsors. When she gets canceled for something said while going live, her fancy influencer life starts to fall apart. She and her boyfriend break up and--to make things even worse--journalist Aly Ray Carter writes a scathing piece about Lola, calling her vapid (and more). After that, no one will touch her.

Lola does little to nothing to convince us that she is not the vapid influencer Aly writes about. She cares about very little but money, status, and notoriety. She's also a terrible friend, especially to her BFF, Ryan, who stars as the stereotypical gay best friend, but is also way too forgiving of this girl. (She can't even remember the name of his boyfriend, or to show up to meet him for dinner.)

Meanwhile, as Lola and Ryan flee to the Hamptons, they find out they are staying right next door to Aly. Aly and Lola become romantically entangled, leading to some very spicy scenes and Lola's downright refusal to accept that she could be bisexual.

Here's where the book gets extra confusing: everyone is allowed to come out on their own terms. No one has to label themselves as anything against their wishes. As the book progresses, some pretty awful stuff does happen to Lola, and no one should be outed against their wishes. At the same time, her cluelessness about what the queer community faces (her best friend is gay for god's sake) is just insane. In many ways, this sums up my feelings for this story: vacillating between sympathy for Lola and then wanting to shake sense into her.

I'm not really sure the point of this story. Putting aside the money and bad decisions, Lola was just someone trying to figure herself out. (Yes, she does this badly for the most part.) The NYC elite come off looking as bad as ever, here, and you'll find yourself grateful to be a poor, normal person with zero social status.

Not really a book I'd recommend, but I didn't completely hate it, either. So confusing!

Glamorous, messy, and irresistibly addictive.
Hotter in the Hamptons is the ultimate summer escape - full of scandal, heat, and unexpected chemistry. Lola’s downfall to desire story is fresh, fun, and impossible to put down. Perfect for fans of romance with bite and beach-read drama. Thank you

The reviews on this one really surprise me. I thought it was a fun summer read. A good enemies to lovers storyline. Could there be some improvement on the flow here and there? Sure, but I didn't think it was nearly as chaotic as people are saying. I try to not look at reviews first, but several caught my attention. I think this is a great debut! It was an easy & quick paced read. Loved the focus on how people view others on social media and how it can affect the influencer. Very current topics.

Thank you Bloom Books for the ARC!

This will be an ideal summer beach read for New Yorkers, Hamptons go-ers and fans of Tinx. Definitely a very steam lesbian romance, so will also be great for LGBTQIA readers!

Hotter in the Hamptons was indeed HOT. It was the perfect way to kick off summer, making me want to book a trip out East asap. Wonderful debut into the fiction space, Tinx!

We've heard of Tinx the influencer, but Tinx the author? This was a fun read. The vibes and atmosphere were bringing it, and the characters were likable and fun.

Thank you to NetGalley for this eARC in exchange for my honest review. I appreciate it!

This story started strong…but fell flat quickly. I ended up really effing mad at this book.

Lola, a canceled influencer, falls for Aly Ray Carter—the journalist who canceled her. The romance had potential, but instead gave us problematic queer rep. Lola insists she’s not gay, despite being seriously attracted to Aly. Her attraction is dismissed as “liking hot people,” and no one seems to understand bisexual or pansexual identity—including the author.

Aly stands up for herself and the politics of queerness once and somehow ends up the bad guy saying “I’m an a-hole.” Lola’s mom chimes in later with, “I dated a girl once, but I’m not gay,” and it all reads as lowkey anti-queer.

Worse? The author is a canceled influencer, just like Lola. Even the fashion school is the same. But while Lola gets canceled for calling a suit “lesbian chic,” Tinx was called out for old, misogynistic tweets about women being fat (for example). The authors background and this context makes Lola’s selfishness and COMPLETE lack of growth and remorse even harder to ignore.

Also:

✨Aly is reduced to a plot device.
✨Ryan, the gay best friend, is a total stereotype.
✨ Lola dumps a genuinely good guy who she led to believe would have a life with her. Justin deserved better.
✨And, Tinx name-drops her own podcast in the book. Cringe.
✨ The ending is also just horrible.

Enemies-to-lovers with queer leads? Great in theory - I could have loved this book. But this needed way more awareness & care.

Hard pass from me. I’m tagging the author (under 4 stars, I usually don’t), but honestly? She needs this feedback. Although she makes fun of Aly for having 9,000 followers so I’m sure my little account is a blip on her radar🙄

I also saw this dang thing got picked up for a series. - Here’s hoping they get a queer writer for the love of all things gay).

I found it quite difficult to immerse myself in the world and it didn't quite live up to all the hype I had seen online pre its release.

This book was terribly written and the story was embarrassingly bad - yet I couldn't put it down?

Gabrielle Korn deserved better!

I can see what Tinx is trying to do with Hotter in the Hamptons, I just don’t think she managed to pull it off because the narrator is such a vapid, self-centred caricature of everything society thinks “content creators” (influencers!!) are. This book reeks of privilege (maybe Tink's private school education that she mentions in the acknowledgements has something to do this with this...); I almost guffawed at the narrator claiming her life had been hard in the closing chapter. What was hard about her life? A lot of the difficult things came about because she acted like a complete idiot with no regard for any of the people in her life who she supposedly cared about (the phone call with her mum when she completely ignored everything she said made me furious!!).

I’m not too sure what Tinx’s view of bisexuality is, but the narrator’s is absolutely wild. It was really strange to read a book like this in 2025. Certainly not a book I would be recommending for the sapphic community. There were characters in it who felt almost like caricatures of sapphic women; Aly was literally a lesbian stereotype and her whole going for straight girls thing just felt so early 2000s. So much of this book felt dated. It read like Samantha’s gay 'moment' in Sex and the City. And that was what, 20-25 years ago?!

By the end, Lola has grown as a person, that’s clear. Although she definitely needed to grow as she was utterly unbearable at times. I love a chaotic narrator at the best of times, but there were so few redeeming aspects of her character that I struggled to get through the first 30% of the book. Eventually, when the romance with Aly begins, the story becomes more interesting and different sides to Lola are revealed. It’s almost like her gay awakening makes her slightly more likeable. The chaotic romance between the two is toxic and love-bomby, but I loved it. This part for me was definitely the most enjoyable. Lola was even charming in parts (apart from the whole “who’s Emmett?” part- I felt so bad Ryan!).

All in all, I gave this 2 stars. It was entertaining in parts, despite Lola being a largely unlikeable protagonist, who mistreated the people in her life who loved her and whose privilege carried her through despite her being “cancelled”. Although she claimed to have had it hard, the worst thing that she experienced was a Gen Z teen being a little mean to her. That was literally it. So, Lola, you weren’t for me, but maybe you’ll be more enjoyable for someone else!

I must admit, I had no idea who Tinx was before reading this book. I also admit, I won't be following her socials or podcasts any time soon. But I will be a devout follower of her written work or whoever is her ghost writer. CAVEAT - I did not take this book seriously as anything other than a lite summer read. The book transported me back to a northeast beach summer where the unabashed love for sex worked its way into my body in the most delicious ways.

Thank you to SOURCEBOOKS Bloom Books | Bloom Books and NetGalley for providing an eARC for a honest review.

there was another review for this book that i read that said something along the lines of reading this book gave them irreparable psychic damage. i couldn’t explain it better myself.

for what is supposed to be a steamy summer lesbian romance, this was honestly ridiculously homophobic. the “i can’t be anything other than straight” mentality was demeaning and weird. every character was a one dimensional stereotype with literally no growth besides realisations about human nature that ive seen five year old girls have. like what do you mean “really looked at him”.

the only slightly redeeming thing about this book is the rumoured ghost writer. like do you understand how much of a terrible person you, the author, have to be to have a ghost writer and then have that ghost writer more than likely go completely out of their way to make you come across as the worst person in this book, and then how also how vapid you must be to read this and go yeah this is a good book! and then have a team of people that say the same thing??? girl take some advice from your own book and fire your publicist.

Thank you #Netgalley for the copy!

I had been hearing about this book and learned it was already picked up to be a TV series. This was a great summer beach read following Lola as her influencer world crumbles and she escapes to the Hamptons with her BFF. There are so many comedic moments and really captures the new influencer world and how quickly things rise and fall. Very quick, light hearted, funny summer read!

The perfect summer read: Drama? Check. A rival? Check. An unexpected "friendships"? Also check. This is exactly what I want to take with me to read on summer vacation. And if there was no summer vacation? Plant me out in my backyard with a hose and an umbrella and reading books just like these make be think I am.

Lola’s professional and personal life fell apart after the release of a exposé, and she heads for the Hamptons with her best friend to escape. Unfortunately her plan didn't work so well.

I really wanted to like this book, but it didn't do it for me, but I finished it.

Thank you NetGalley and Bloom Books for giving me an ARC.