This was a delight to read. There were parts that I actually laughed out loud at. The clowns – THE CLOWNS! I was dying! The dialogue was snappy and snarky in places, and I love me some snark.

I absolutely loved the different aspects of two cultures and their assumptions coming together in this story. There were positive culture meshing, and difficult culture clash as an American born man and a Filipina woman try to build and grow their relationship.

In addition to the main love story, touching on cultural biases with an adjacent LGBTQ+ relationship was fantastically woven into the main structure of the story. This is one of the places where the culture clash was hardest. Ms. de la Cruz did a fantastic job of calling out the difficulty that older immigrants can have with how different things are here (but also not entirely different, let’s be honest), and the struggle with acceptance when one of their family members comes out.

I heavily identified with the FMC, Dalisay, the pressure she put on herself for living up to her family’s expectations, and the difficulty she has with looking at the core of who she is through a different lens. In her case, it was shifting the view of her core values of family from her Filipina upbringing to a more Americanized lens and understanding how Evan saw her. It was so hard to see just how much more pressure for traditional family values were on Dalisay and Nicole, but I also liked that the author called this out.

Kudos to Melissa de la Cruz. I will be reading more of her work.

I was provided a copy of this book for my honest review