Apparently my theme this week is “romance with mental illness” as this ARC is exactly that.

Just a heads up, I am a member of the ARC team for Ally Williams, so this was provided to me free of charge in exchange for an honest review.

A sweet romance that combined some of my favorite things, yoga and code. However, because I am intimately familiar with code and the nomenclature around it, I did struggle at points with the language used by Zeke, the freelance web developer in the book and the male main character. This was particularly bad for me toward the beginning of the book, and made it hard to connect with the characters and the story. 

The language that was bothering me in particular was the description of front end vs backend work. An admin portal is still front end work because it is seen by the consumer. There is no way in hell that when Zeke referred to the backend that he mean that he would be having the deli owners poking at PHP or whatever backend language he used to get their site connected to the database.

I did see a lot of myself in Gabi, but some of her attitude and personality were difficult to draw lines from her past. There is often a reason why someone is closed off that goes back farther than assault and an emotionally manipulative/abusive ex. I have a hard time believing that she changed that quickly and it was not more of a childhood experience or trait that solidifies as she experiences different types of violence from men.

I struggle with anxiety and depression, and they were not triggered by a single event in my life. There have been many different incidents starting in childhood and compounded throughout out messaging in the media and other incidents in my life. While every person is different, there is usually a lot of similarity that makes it easier to connect with characters than I felt was possible with this story.

I think if the story line was tightened up a bit, and there was more intensity around Dustin and his bullshit that would have helped add some urgency to the disaster beat later in the story. It also felt like the aftermath was a little blithely handled by Zeke, Gabi, AND her neighbor who just appeared?

Overall, I liked the story as well as the spice, and by the end I was fully invested. Zeke is a genuinely sweet guy, and at the same time feels two dimensional. Maybe this book just wasn’t fully my cup of tea? But I liked it enough to finish it and get the warm fuzzies by the end of the story.