There are a couple of tropes that I just…cannot with, and this one unfortunately falls squarely within one of them: the very very short “relationship” / “hooking up” from ages ago that neither character has ever forgotten.
It seems lazy, in my mind, because most of the time it feels like the author wants the emotional fallout of a long relationship without the work that goes into figuring out why two people who had a legitimate breakup might end up together again. Usually in life the way it goes is that if it was a short relationship, it lacks the emotional resonance to really reverberate through your life…but then it’s easier to pick things up again when you’re back in the right time/emotional headspace. But then if it was a long relationship, it changes you…and usually it ended for reasons that are harder to overlook and likely to hinder a reunion. Only in Romancelandia do short relationships (one kiss, one week, one summer) mean Everything and not cause serious emotional trauma.
THAT ASIDE, Bellefleur continues to do the Female Lord’s work of putting out f/f romances for the thirsty sapphic and sapphic loving crowd. All of her characters intersect in the way that serial romance novels do–this person is the roommate who we saw in the prior novel, every so often a side character is introduced with a suspiciously detailed backstory, aka we’ll be getting their story very soon–but it always makes a little more sense when you’re talking about queer communities, which are smaller and tend to be a bit…overlap-y.
I found this novel much less character frustrating than Written in the Stars if only because I also cannot with astrology (wow, I’m a picky reader) but I was happy to see some of the characters from that novel make a reappearance here, happily together. The best sort of an epilogue–naturally occurring updates, instead of the “and now baby!” ones we get usually.
