Cutesy! I got this one as an ARC from LoveNotes PR, so thank you to them!! This one was kind of a slow burn, both in the sense that it took a little while for the characters to get together and for me to get into it, but it grew on me after a little while. I’m also not gonna lie, I did start the first book in this series but did not finish it.
The Care Package follows Tania, a delivery driver/tattoo artist in training who only emotionally lets in her cats, and Carlo, a fellow delivery driver/artist wannabe who’s been crushing on her for a year now. When disaster strikes, Tania needs a place to stay and Carlo is more than willing to offer his spare bedroom. Of course, their crushes fester, but after being hurt too many times, Tania isn’t sure if she can trust him.
This book really doesn’t have much interesting plot, or like solvable issues for the characters, which made it a little boring. The main conflict keeping the couple apart is that they work together, but literally on page 16 it’s stated there’s no rules against it, and since neither party has seniority over the other, this is kind of a non-issue? Maybe it would be awkward if it ended badly, but they mostly avoided each other at work for like a year up to this point so again, that obstacle felt conflated. It also feels a little weird to call it a workplace romance considering that while yes, they do work at the same place, they don’t really work together per say. They get to work, say hello, then hop in their separate trucks until they are done for the day. While they meet at work, we don’t actually see them interacting at work often enough for it to qualify as a workplace romance. No hate to delivery drivers, but this workplace setting is also just...boring. We do spend a decent amount of time at the tattoo parlor where Tania is an apprentice, which is interesting enough.
One of the common themes of the book is parental approval, specifically Carlo getting his dad’s approval. His dad wants him to follow his dream or at least get a “better” job, which Carlo feels very hurt by but he also doesn’t do much about it until Tania comes into his life. This was a meh plotpoint. It felt like too easy of a fix when this was resolved, and we didn’t get to see much of Carlo actually putting in the work to be a successful artist. Another sideplot is about Tania’s old foster sister Celeste, who was wrongfully (ish) imprisoned for assaulting a man who’d SA’d her. Tania is trying to get Celeste a retrial to lesson her sentence, which could have been really interesting...if we read about it from Celeste’s perspective. Really (slight spoiler here?) the most that Tania does is convince Celeste to talk to a lawyer. Tania didn’t find the lawyer, she doesn’t have anything to do with the case besides being Celeste’s sister, and we only get snippets of how the case is going throughout the book. With both MC’s main plots, neither of them actually take that much action, or we just don’t see much of it, which means I didn’t care about them. (Spoiler here too): Tania also receives a HOUSE from her parent’s will, which is a cool setting switch that I appreciated but it felt very disconnected from the rest of the book. The house also introduced new side characters, which enforced another issue I had: every side character except Celeste was either completely forgettable and had no discernible personality or was lowkey a stereotype. Not great. Carlo and Tania themselves were cute, though Carlo also felt a little underdeveloped. They also rushed into things extremely quickly. An exact time frame isn’t clear, but towards the end of the book, Carlo suggests that it’s been less than a month, which is a crazy short amount of time to do everything they do together. Overall, it was cute but had a lot of issues and was kinda forgettable.