Thank you to NetGalley and Forever (Grand Central Publishing) for providing me a chance to read this story and provide an honest review.

This was a story that follows chefs Alice Sullivan and Kiana Jackson. They were friendly rivals in culinary school who lost touch for a few years. One chef became a social media influencer with a food truck who traveled around the country. The other chef had her own restaurant on top of other things she had to take care of.

Alice mad a promise to her late grandfather to protect his land and never sell it. Kia was looking to purchase the land but she wasn’t aware of Alice’s involvement with it. They were both surprised at a third party putting a dent in their plans. I will say Kia and Alice both worked my nerves. Kia was reckless with her livestreams telling her business before it was finalized. Alice needed to grow up and take responsibility for what put her in the current situation. The story follows this pair as they joined forces to meet their individual goals together. They deserved each other. This was a quick fun read by new to me authors.

i’ve previously read & loved karelia stetz-waters’s books satisfaction guaranteed and behind the scenes, so it only made sense to pick up her newest work, co-written with her wife! unfortunately, i have come to regret this decision.

reading the beginning of this was rough for me. i know that characters need room to grow and change over the course of the work (otherwise, what’s the point? especially in a romance – a genre which is intrinsically character/relationship focused), but man… kia was hard to swallow. her thoughtlessness and disregard for the people around her was both hard to read about and confusing in terms of character traits, considering the fact that she was also very concerned with the welfare of the people around her. i realize this sounds very contradictory, and believe me, it was. she spent a lot of time trying to look out for disenfranchised and marginalized people (such as a mother and her trans daughter who run a food truck together) while also having very little regard for the reality of what making a change meant to them. i was genuinely flabbergasted by the fact that she told these vulnerable people to pack up their lives and follow her to the promised land – ahem, taste the love land – without a done deal in hand. yes, i understand the whole point is it was “basically” a done deal. but the fact of the matter is that it was not a done deal, and to me it felt… flippant? like, her fucking livestreams fucked with these people’s lives in a major way. i spent a lot of time thinking about me’shell and her daughter, but i actually have no idea how they fared while kia and sullivan spent all this time on the lawsuit. idk. it came off very immature to me, especially from someone who’s thirty years old! like, girl! get it together!

don’t get me started on sullivan, either – a whole ass thirty-five year old adult who threw out MULTIPLE letters from the neighborhood association because “who sends important stuff in the mail except the IRS and the bank”. baby, get serious. i’m eight years younger than you and i get plenty of other important stuff in the mail, so i know your millennial ass should know better! i cannot take her weepiness about “why did no one tell me in person :(” shit seriously when they sent her letter after letter about it. sure, maybe someone should’ve mentioned it. but don’t act like they didn’t try at all!

the plot was fine, i guess. it wasn’t quite enough to get me on board after that rocky start – i need to see some real character development to come back from that, and i don’t really feel like we got that. little things rubbed me the wrong way throughout the narrative, too – like kia and her assistant using AI to message her fans back. to be fair, this isn’t discussed a lot, so i’m not 100% sure what exactly the authors meant to express here – but this lack of clarity doesn’t really help me. if it’s not generative AI that kia is using, i would appreciate it if that was made more clear, or if it could be excluded altogether (since it was only brought up a few times). regardless, is this really necessary to include? especially in this day and age, and especially in a book that’s meant to highlight environmentalism? also, brief side bar, why was it necessary to invent a new social media platform (u-spin)?? other people in the book used instagram, and u-spin wasn’t ever really explained, so i’m kind of baffled by this random invention. it felt unnecessary.

had to edit this and come back to one more thing — the way that sullivan was described sometimes really bothered me. on two separate occasions, kia described her as having “lesbian swagger / sexy masc lesbian vibe” then immediately followed these statements by saying how all the guys fell for sullivan and she dated so many men in their program. maybe i’m the friend who’s too woke, but this was off-putting to me as a lesbian. you can express that sullivan is both bisexual & masc without painting her as this, like, almost-but-not-really-forbidden-fruit to men because she “looks” like a lesbian? it smacks of something weird to me.

i’m sorry that this review is largely a list of complaints. i wish it wasn’t – like i said, i’ve been a big fan in the past, so i’m actually very disappointed that i didn’t love this one. if you’re someone who really enjoys marriages of convenience or influencer characters, you’ll probably like it a lot more than me. hopefully my next try with this author will be more successful (or i can just reread behind the scenes, my beloved).

This was so cute! I have read Second Night Stand by these authors and loved it so I had high expectations for this one. This book exceeded my expectations which is rare because I am a very picky reader. I understood why the characters liked each other and what the motives behind their actions were and that makes me so happy. I will say don't read this if you want a true rivals to lovers vibe. There was a lot of tension and progress but none of the pure dislike that seems to be present in those types of books.

What a fun book! Sexy and funny and so heartfelt. Worth reading and rereading

A special thank you to NetGalley and Forever (Grand Central Publishing) for a ARC in exchange for an honest review.