Add Me Maybe

by Brooke Hartwell

328 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 25, 2026

About the author

Most of my best lines come from standing in line at the grocery store, listening to strangers. I have also personally typed out a very honest message and then deleted it, so I know what I'm doing.

Reviews

[G · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received a free copy of this book via Booksprout and am voluntarily leaving a review.
"Title: Add Me Maybe?
Author: Brooke Hartwell
Rating: 4/5
Recommendation:
Spice: 5/10 chilis
Top tropes: TL; DR: Overall, I liked it. Could it use some polish? Certainly, but can't we all? I still recommend it for a fluffy, low-investment, low-stress romance. He fell first, and he did something about it. If anything, these characters have the healthiest communication and emotional intelligence I have ever seen in a romance novel, and I do not hate it. It proves that healthy relationships can exist in this genre and that the miscommunication trope is overplayed. Something I have complained about for years.

This story is long; let's point that out right off the bat, but it worked for me.

This story went beyond the typical beginning of heroine conflict with relationship, meets new guy, breaks up with old guy and gets with new guy, bam happy ending. This story explores the development of a relationship that began under murky terms, back-to-back with a breakup, modern social media use in relationships, and the consequences of being a bit too open online.

There's no cheating on the part of our main characters!
Though, frankly, the heroine's spinelessness towards our original relationship is a bit off-putting. The character development felt a bit stilted and choppy. The dialogue was...odd. I liked it, but it felt like an inside joke of the authors. I am unfamiliar with the authors' backlog of work, so I have no idea how experienced they are. It felt like a junior author's work, at least compared to my history of reading established vs new authors and the entire spectrum of self-pub to trad pub.


Meet-cute: a memorable first encounter that sets up romantic chemistry,
Forbidden love: social rules, family expectations, or external conflicts oppose the match,
Secret Relationship: hiding the romance/friendships due to stakes, shame, politics, or danger, complicated situations
Love Triangle: competing interests create tension and difficult choices,
Slow Burn: gradual emotional intimacy before physical romance,
Touch Starved/Yearning: longing, restraint, and subtle physical closeness build tension,
Quirky Banter: comedic dialogue that signals chemistry, One Person Pines/the other doesn't notice / Unrequited: unbalanced attention and eventual realization on both sides,
Happily ever after or Happily for now: the emotional resolution and commitment wrap-up.

[Nora's Reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

Add Me Maybe had me hooked from the very first chapter and didn't let go until the last page. This is a slow burn campus romance built on a genuinely fun gimmick: our heroine Piper, a perpetual fixer who's spent her whole life making herself easy and low-maintenance, keeps crossing paths with Theodore Radcliffe, an icy, terrifyingly competent heir who rescues her over and over without ever quite admitting it's on purpose. Underneath the will-they-won't-they is a clever secret-identity thread involving anonymous online advice-swapping that could have felt like a gimmick but ends up doing real emotional work rather than just fueling cute banter, though there's plenty of that too.

Piper's arc is the real spine of the book. Her habit of making herself easy, no needs, no mess, no inconvenient credit-taking, is drawn with real specificity, and watching her learn to say "this is mine" out loud, first in small ways and eventually about her own feelings, is more satisfying than the romance beats themselves. Theo is catnip if you like your love interests deadpan, over-competent, and incapable of admitting they care via any method other than logistics. His texts alone are worth the read. The side characters aren't wasted either; there's a terrific confrontation scene involving one of Piper's friends that's sharper and more emotionally honest than most subplots like this manage. The conflict that eventually threatens Piper and Theo's relationship is handled with restraint rather than melodrama, and it never tips into anything cartoonish.

If I'm being honest about what kept this from a full five stars. There's a big emotional rupture later in the book that felt so real and so earned, and then the resolution came a little too quickly for how much damage had been done. I wanted to sit in that discomfort a bit longer before everything got tied back together. I also noticed the prose leaning on a lot of short, clipped sentences back to back, which works great for tension but got a little repetitive over a long reading session. And if the whole "possessive hero who fixes everything even when you ask him not to" trope isn't your thing, know that it's very present here before it gets recontextualized later on.

But genuinely, none of that stopped me from loving this. It's funny, it's tender in a way I didn't expect, it's spicy when it wants to be, and it left me smiling at the very last page.

[Maria · Rating 1 out of 5]

Theodore Radcliffe helps Piper after she sprains her ankle, but when she tries to pay him back through Venmo, he sends the money right back. Piper adds him on Venmo anyway because he asked her to. Then she comes across a Reddit thread where someone is asking whether being added on Venmo means that the person who added you likes you. Piper realizes that the Venmo handle and the Reddit username belong to the same person.
From that point on, Piper starts reading Theo’s Reddit updates without him knowing that she’s actually seeing everything he writes about her.

Theodore is introduced as this mysterious guy that nobody really knows much about, but everyone knows all the rumors surrounding him. Except he’s honestly more weird than mysterious. Usually, the whole mysterious guy aura makes me curious about a character and pulls me in, but here it mostly just made him feel kind of boring and exhausting to me.
Piper is the kind of person who never asks anyone for help and tends to put up with a lot of things, even when they aren’t good for her.
Zane and Ivy are basically there for you to hate them, and they definitely succeeded at that because I really struggled to find anything likable about either of them.
Overall, the characters just didn’t grab my attention much, aside from a few moments here and there.

As for the story, it was pretty cringe at first, and the more I read, the more bored I became. Everything moves so slowly, and for the longest time it feels like the plot is barely moving at all. And whenever something finally starts getting interesting, the moment is dragged out for so long that it ends up becoming tedious instead of exciting.

Honestly, I thought I was going to love this book when I read the synopsis, and I also really loved the cover when I first saw it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it past chapter 14. The pacing was just way too slow for me, and in the end, I think this is simply a case of the book not being the right fit for me.

I know this one will probably work much better for other readers, but sadly, it just wasn’t my cup of tea.

[Brooke Hartwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

My own book, so obviously biased — but I had the best time writing Piper and Theo.