Rating: 4 stars
Ama Torres is an excellent wedding planner, who really gives her all to make sure the weddings she arranges go off without a hitch. However, personally, she doesn't believe in marriage or in relationships that really last a lifetime. Probably because her mother has been married so many times (Ama has arranged a lot of her weddings). Now she has a whole host of former step-siblings, some of which she works with, others who she can rope in when she needs a favour. Despite Ama usually doing fairly small, intimate weddings, she is contracted to arrange the wedding of a famous Instagram star (a woman Ama sees as a personal role model). It will be Ama's biggest job yet, and her former employer is making things difficult by booking up a lot of the available vendors on the date in question.
Another complication is that the brides have contracted Elliot Bloom to do the flowers for the wedding. Ama and Elliot have a history - which ended when Ama broke Elliot's heart several years previous. Now she's going to have to arrange the biggest, most high-profile wedding of her career while working closely with a man who most likely hates her.
Romances starring commitment-phobic wedding planners seem to be a subgenre of its own. Ama (not going to tell you her full name, but it's a great one) has a lot of issues with relationships, mainly due to her mother's many many marriages. She prefers simple flings until she meets Elliot, who is the complete opposite. When Elliot falls for someone, it is forever - which doesn't work out so well for either of them.
This is a really fun second chance romance, where about half of the story is told in flashbacks, so we see the beginning of Ama and Elliot's relationship, and discover what finally went wrong between them. The present-day story, with Ama ultra-competently finding solutions to all of the wealthy brides' many demands, even being sabotaged by her former boss, is a lot of fun too, although it becomes painfully clear that Ama needs a ton of therapy. She is far too much of a workaholic, and then there are all the commitment issues because of her mom's serial monogamy. I would have liked there to be some kind of acknowledgment that at some point, after the story's end, she would deal with some of these issues, to make sure she doesn't get cold feet and hurt poor Elliot again.
I know Ms. Soto has another romance coming out in the summer of 2024, but nothing about what it will be about. I hope she at some point in the future writes a book about Ama's beautiful and funny photographer stepsister, because she seems like she would be a great heroine.
Judging a book by its cover: The US cover for this makes it seem like Reylo fan fiction because the guy on the cover is yet another Adam Driver look-alike. The UK cover has both characters looking far too cutesy (although Ama is described as looking a lot like a teenager). I don't think either cover really fits the book very well.
Crossposted on Cannonball Read
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