Lian needs a fake date for her brother's wedding and Grace, doing a mutual friend a favor, agrees. Of course sparks are going to fly.

What I liked about this is that the girls each knows how the other feels--no does she or doesn't she--and the story is how they work through the feelings. Definitely worth the read. ( )

Note: book is available on Kindle Unlimited, and the audiobook is ALSO available on KU / audible for free

⭐️⭐️/5
🌶/4

Lia may be from the UK, but she's been living in NY and running a bookstore with her best friend Rosie for almost a decade. Her brother is getting married, and she may have forgotten to tell her mother that she broke up with the girlfriend her mother still think's is coming...

Grace is from NY and grew up with Rosie. After the death of her parents and a shocking revelation, she moved to Spain to spend time with her grandmother and she hasn't left Europe since. Now she's based in London and since she's also still Rosie's best friend, she agrees to do her a favor and pretends to be Lia's girlfriend for the weekend at the wedding.

Things should have ended there, but sparks fly and through some other twists of fate they end up on a road trip in the states. There are plenty of adventures and one-bed situations to keep things interesting at every turn, but see below for why this story didn't hit the mark for me. I liked Lia as a character and liked... parts of Grace. But there were just too many things that were problematic for me to really enjoy this one.

**Spoilers Ahead**

This should have been a cute, cartoon cover sapphic romance. There were 2 major things that knocked off stars for me, regardless of the character chemistry.

1) Grace and the fact that 95% of the drama in this book is caused by her making an assumption when she was 17 and going through a traumatic time... and then never asking anyone about it. Instead she lives with this incorrect assumption, hates the wrong people, and spends years in a dark place because of it. There is a passing mention of getting back into therapy.... in the epilogue... but DAMN. If there is ever an example of someone who desperately needed someone to talk to and get advice from.... it's Grace. Her refusal to actually learn the truth for... literally over a decade leads to SO MUCH emotional drama and a general roller coaster of events that could have been avoided if she just asked ANYONE in her family. So so dumb, it annoyed me the whole time.

2) The way the sexuality of these characters is addressed:

*Caveat - I am not on the Ace spectrum so these are just my observations comparing to some of the other literature I've read, so take all of this with a grain of salt.

Lia is bisexual and open about it. It's well established and not really questioned (other than by her ex who is... unfortunate and who her proper British parents hope she still ends up with. barf).

Grace on the other hand.... she's harder to pin down. In the beginning she is clearly coded as being somewhere under the Asexual umbrella, and there are a lot of classic dismissive ideas thrown at her like "oh you just haven't met the right girl" and "you can't possibly be happy on your own" etc etc. When expressing her disdain for these kinds of reactions, one of the earliest connections she has with Lia is the fact that Lia seems to actually understand and validate these feelings and respect them (regardless of her own growing attraction to Grace). There are mentions of her never having immediate attractions to people and needing to know them first. She doesn't express as never having sexual attraction, just very limited and only with people she's formed a bond with, so to me that reads as demisexual and there are SO many signs for that in the book, especially as her connection to Lia grows and her sexual desires do manifest.

Where it gets a bit more gray is when the idea of family trauma gets brought into it. Grace's parents died in a horrible car accident, her mom died before she could even get to the hospital and as her dad was fighting for his life, through trying to offer him her blood for a transfusion... she finds out they don't match and that he isn't her biological father... and she never knew. While there are so many possible reasons for this, Grace takes the worst possible assumption (that her mom was unfaithful and that her entire happy childhood was somehow a lie?) and runs with that. Never asks her family if, oh I don't know... her parents maybe had fertility issues? The whole thing was dumb and drawn out (see part 1).

The key reason why this is an issue related to her sexuality is that there are some connections made between her relationship choices and her feeling of betrayal and negative reaction to the "I'm not your father" revelation. In essence, she shut down emotionally for over 5 years after a bad breakup and didn't feel connected to anyone close enough to get intimae with them, so she just didn't have any sexual relations at all because she wasn't in a relationship. If read one way, that tracks completely with being demisexual. She wasn't getting close enough emotionally to anyone, so she didn't have meaningless sexual relations because that's not how her sexuality works. However the implication was made more than once that it was just her emotional trauma that caused that pause in dating... not ALSO her sexuality.

It's a fine line, but this seemed like a situation that should be a both/and, not a pick one. The emotional trauma could be the reason she didn't trust emotional connection... but part of the reason she was ok with not having sex with random strangers/ one-night stands was ALSO becasue that never appeals to her anyway and so it seemed like less of an issue to just... not have sexual relations at all.

**Final Thoughts**

This should have been a fun fake dating, opposites attract, Sapphic cartoon cover romance. Instead the author chose to once again (see my review of the first book in this duet) make internal miscommunication the main trope. All of the issues in this book stem from the main character telling herself an incorrect assumption and never taking the time to find out the truth, and then letting that poison every aspect of her life. I'm also not a fan of how there was such potential for a demisexual person to have rep... and then their sexuality seems to be invalidated in multiple spots. Overall this is just a no from me. ( )

I definitely enjoyed the first book (Read Between The Lines) more, but this one was amazing, too! ( )

Enjoyed this one more than the first in the series. Grace and Lia were great together and Lia's demand for open and direct communication was aces! I will say that the issue at the center of Grace's troubles seemed super obvious to me and sort of set off my BS meter that in a decade, it wasn't ever considered as a possibility but, as my wife likes to remind me, it's pretend.

Rosie and Jane appear regularly in No Rings Attached but it's not necessary to have read [b:Read Between the Lines|57518631|Read Between the Lines (Ms. Right #1)|Rachel Lacey|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1622054038l/57518631._SX50_.jpg|87709765] first. My general dislike of Rosie persisted and I still like Jane. :-)

Definitely a solid offering from Ms. Lacey. I'll be taking on her very new novel, [b:She'll Steal Your Heart|58907173|She'll Steal Your Heart (Midnight in Manhattan #4)|Rachel Lacey|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1659930881l/58907173._SY75_.jpg|92813641], soon. ( )