general

• quick summary - photographer eva and her longtime friend detective winston pretend to be in love at nathan's mother's dinner party so he can avoid mrs winston's matchmaking (while being secretly in love with each other). at the same time, they have to solve a mystery and capture a criminal that can put everyone in danger.
• key themes - romance, female relationships and rivalry, class, mystery.
• fav character - little sammy :') he was so adorable.

interests

• what i found interesting - it is difficult to say, because there were many themes introduced that are interesting, but that were not developed in the best way. however, I would say that I enjoyed eva's fighting with the idea of perfection and calm she has been projecting to others and ultimately coming to terms that can not always be real. it was also deeply relatble seeing her understand how something that happened to her as a teenager still affects her so deeply, but I wish we would have seen her deconstructing it more clearly + the relationship between nathan's sisters and eva was very sweet.
• fav quote - "how odd that an adult could feel the same emotion she'd experienced as a younger person when in similar circumstances"

books it reminded me of

• a rulebook for restless rogues - a friends-to-lovers romance that did it properly.

rating

• 3.25/5 - this was so disappointing, I don't think it even deserves the rating I am giving it. the fact that the couple already knew each other before the start of the book takes away from the initial excitement of a romance that the author was not able to make up for. nathan figuring out that eva liked him out of nowhere was very unsatisfactory. the hyper awareness of gender and class issues of the time in a historical book is annoying to say the least, despite this book not being the only one guilty of this. the mystery in itself was boring and things did not start happening until the last 20% of the story. I was so over the 'mean girl' situation— the author could have approached it with some nuance. the prose in itself is good, and I loved the last scene. the characters are adorable and deal with very real emotions, but the plot in this one was just not good. I will still read the third installment but just because of charlotte.