Toaster oven friend-to-lovers, falling in love with straight
BFF – these are tropes that cover wish and reality of most gay women. So this
is an easy sell.
Maya Davis has been in love with her straight BFF
from college, Nina Sterling, for a while. Their drunken night together
in college ended badly when Nina flung hurtful words at Maya the next day. While
that didn’t kill Maya’s feelings for Nina, she distanced herself and Nina has
spent two years since then trying to build their friendship back. Nina is soon
to be married and Maya is a bridesmaid. All is not well in Nina’s world. She is
in a job that she doesn’t like and where she is socially ignored. She has an
insufferable mother who cuts Nina with every word she speaks. She is about to
be married to a man who cannot hear her and like her mother’s expectation of
her, he too expects Nina to go along with whatever he wants. Except that Nina
is developing a backbone at the most inconvenient time. She is growing more
self-aware and assertive.
The book starts off with Maya but is primarily Nina’s
coming-of-age story. Nina is a very, very likeable character. Maya is okay.
Nina’s cousin, Rachel, supposed to be quirky and loveable, was quite
irritating. We also found the casual and continuous use of pot/weed and its
normalisation rather discomfiting. The only thing that made us go through the
book was Nina. The one other character (in a tiny role) that we liked was
Chloe.
This book is at best okay.
PS: About the rating: We just cannot bring ourselves to give a higher rating to any book that normalises weed when it is almost clearly a problem for the character. We would have given this one an even lesser rating, except that we really, really liked Nina.
PS: About the rating: We just cannot bring ourselves to give a higher rating to any book that normalises weed when it is almost clearly a problem for the character. We would have given this one an even lesser rating, except that we really, really liked Nina.
⭐⭐★
