Read Between the Lines; Rachel Lacey

It's no secret that the author leaned heavily on “You’ve Got Mail” in this book, she even has the characters say so at one point which was… something. But here we have a sapphic romance between a bookstore owner being evicted from the location she ran with her mother, and the property developer (and secret romance author) whose family business was the one to evict the cute, bubbly bookstore owner to begin with. These women communicate online, hiding their identities (for Rosie, it’s her full name, and for Jane it’s her name and the fact that writing romance books isn’t her day job), so when they discover that the woman they are crushing on online is the one causing them headaches off the screen, drama ensues. Or it should. This story is laced with so much sweetness and convenient, easy solutions that the delectable drama and tension that should come with two women falling for someone they shouldn’t due to their current circumstances never manifests.

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I kept waiting for the drama and tension to surface between Jane and Rosie. None of that really happens. Jane’s conflict about her day job mostly boils down to the fact that she’d prefer to write for a living and not hide that from her parents, and Rosie lets her roommate Lia handle most of the difficult business decisions for keeping the bookstore afloat. Which might have been fine in a setting outside of New York where the carefree approach to running a brick-and-mortar store never works, and Jane would be filthy rich given her families business and never uses that to her own career advantage. All of that I could have dismissed; it’s a romance, it’s meant to be fluffy and easy to some respect. But the lack of conflict in these women’s personal lives—outside of hurt feelings—made both Rosie and Jane lack any real growth as characters, and as a result, have 0 chemistry with each other. Jane ends up chasing Rosie for so much of the book over issues she has no responsibility (emotionally or otherwise) or power over while Rosie does not offer a grand gesture in return when she comes to realize that she was resentful of the wrong person. Rosie is cute and all, but I found myself wanting better for Jane who, out of the two, had the closest to a character arc, but that’s not saying much.

Rosie and Jane never address their issues, their problems just get taken care of for them so their “issues” get removed without them having to work through them and grow both in their relationship and as characters. The story focuses on the mundane actions of the women moving about the city, and not the real substance of who they are as people—hell the author never even mentions what kind of dog Brinkley is outside of he’s cute, little, and brown. This lack of detail unfortunately carries over to the sex aspects of the romance to where I found those scenes to be tragically lacking.

I keep going back and forth of what to rate this because part of me does feel bad for Jane and, out of the two, I do want to root for her because she got the closest to feeling like a developed character. But the dialogue was stilted, the plot thin, Rosie was kind of a butt, the sex lackluster, and by the time the tension and conflict between the characters’ worlds collided, it’s all resolved in like two chapters. By the end, the book saddened and frustrated me because I wanted more, I wanted better. So, sadly, this is a 1.5 star read for me and I don’t think I’ll be reading more by this author in the future.