Specifically, You

by Jeanine Henning

Taylor Thomas has her life under control. She's a dedicated personal trainer, loves her clients, adores her nosy landlady Myrtle, and dotes shamelessly on her rescue cat, Chicken. She's got zero room for chaos—until a luxury SUV almost turns her into a speed bump.

Behind the wheel? Her brand-new client.

Sam Fairchild doesn't do distractions. Between running a high-profile creative agency, countering a manipulative ex-husband, and navigating family tension, she just wants a trainer to help her reclaim her health. She doesn't want Taylor—the relentless, magnetic blonde who's immune to Sam's CEO voice. Yet sparks fly.

When Sam's sister receives a life-changing diagnosis, boundaries blur and Taylor offers strength without asking for anything in return. As family drama, old wounds, and outside pressures mount, Sam and Taylor must decide—play it safe or risk their hearts.

Specifically, You is a steamy, heartfelt sapphic romance about healing, resilience, and finding home in each other.

321 pages, Kindle Edition

Expected publication October 13, 2026

About the author

Professional cover designer and illustrator to authors and publishers worldwide, Jeanine's extensive creative professional background includes children's book illustration and publication, comic book art and publishing, book cover art, console game design and product branding. In 2007 'Vin The Virus Hunter' was Jeanine's first critically acclaimed Teen Sci-Fi publication in South Africa, along with the bestselling Scarlett's Curse graphic novel, published internationally. "THE NHAKIRA TRILOGY" is Jeanine's first of many Kindle publications as author, and she plans to publish many more adventures for teens and adults!

She also talks about zombie pixies and tea-drinking unicorns quite often. Creative geniuses do that ;)

Reviews

[Drew]

Thank you NetGalley for my free ARC!

I love trying debut books but this one fell somewhat short for me.

I have read a few sapphic romances and I am always looking for more to give it a try because there aren’t that many available like traditional romances!

I enjoyed the relationship between Sam and Taylor but many parts of this book felt cringe to me. Saying “delulu” and very overly sexual dialogue from neighbors and the main characters themselves. Felt very overcompensated for lack of chemistry and relationship building.

I liked the family dynamic portrayals though and enjoy the sister dynamic between Ellie and Sam.

I think this is a short book and it was trying to accomplish a lot in not a lot of time and it was underdeveloped.

I would be willing to read another book by this author in the future.

[BookishAdventuresWithJules]

Specifically You by Jeanine Henning is a sapphic romance focusing on marketing executive Samantha and her personal trainer, Taylor. The latter steps into a supportive role following Sam's sister's breast cancer diagnosis and the relationship deepens from there.

The author's note at the beginning of the book referenced her experiences with her partner's diagnosis and I don't doubt that this part of the book was deeply personal. I appreciate that the book focuses on the importance of support for caregivers of loved ones dealing with serious illness. It is an excruciating experience for everyone involved.

Samantha's driven, type-A with an edge character is a good contrast to Taylor's equally focused but more optimistic personality. Sparks fly at their disastrous first encounter, but the relationship builds over time and feels earned.

The book was intriguing to me, in that one of the main protagonists' is a personal trainer. I wasn't sure how that would land, as I have had negative experiences in the past, but Taylor's approach to fitness is rooted in support and encouragement, which definitely worked for me. Exercise as a form of personal empowerment is a healthier perspective than I usually witness.

I wanted to note that frequent references to unhealthy eating and "bad" foods could be triggering for people navigating past or present disordered eating. The book tries to focus on a more balanced approach, but the presence of these references could be challenging.

Difficult family dynamics exist for both of the main characters, although they manifest in very different ways. The challenging dynamics are honest and are not shied away from, including homophobia.

I appreciated Myrtle's role as a supportive found family member in Taylor's life. We all need to have (or perhaps become) a Myrtle someday. She provided an often wildly inappropriate but also insightful and steadfast presence in the novel. Samantha's bond with her sister Ellie is a focal point of the novel, it blends playfulness and fun with fierce protectiveness and a lasting bond. The juxtaposition of found and blood family ties against the challenges of navigating difficult family members works well to emphasize the power of the bonds we choose with the people who love and support us for who we are.

Samantha's journey to explore her sexuality evolves through the book and when the two main protagonists express how they feel both emotionally and sexually the connection feels honest and earned. This book contains open door scenes that contain deep connection on many levels.

I enjoyed how Sam and Taylor's perspectives blended seamlessly throughout the book, integrated together rather than divided by chapter. This approach really worked for me. The blending of narratives reflects the reciprocity that exists in their relationship. They both have baggage to unpack and process and it is through their mutual support and understanding that healing becomes possible.

The book wrapped up with a thoroughly satisfying conclusion and I am really looking forward to reading future books by this author.

I received an ARC copy of this book via NetGalley, all opinions are my own.

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos]

It’s an SUV, Not a Truck – and Other Ways of Missing the Point
Jeanine Henning’s “Specifically, You” begins with Sam Fairchild correcting Taylor Thomas’s vocabulary and spends the rest of the novel teaching her that accuracy is considerably easier than recognition.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | October 2nd, 2026

During their first meeting, Samantha Fairchild almost hits Taylor Thomas with an SUV and objects first to the noun. Taylor calls the gleaming vehicle a truck. Sam corrects her: “It’s an SUV, not a truck.” Jeanine Henning gets a surprising amount of mileage from that tiny absurdity in “Specifically, You.” Sam runs a creative agency, organizes experience through information, and reaches for accuracy when emotion turns untidy. Taylor, the personal trainer she nearly flattens, will eventually make a different kind of precision matter: not naming the object correctly, but recognizing the person in front of you.

Even Taylor’s profession is more than an excuse to put two attractive women near kettlebells. She believes clients often arrive asking for weight loss, stronger bodies, or better-fitting clothes when what they may really want is to “reclaim – or forge – a part of themselves.” Taylor’s job, as she imagines it, is partly to create enough room for that less obvious desire to surface. Sam works in branding and marketing, where naming desire is more strategic: position the message, understand the audience, control what gets seen. Taylor helps people discover what they want. Sam is excellent at arranging narratives for everyone except herself.

Most of the early pleasure comes dressed as a high-heat sapphic rom-com: a gym owner known as the Vicious Chihuahua, an incorrigible older landlady named Myrtle, a rescue cat called Chicken, friends who treat privacy as a charming theoretical concept, Tampa humidity, wine, coffee, and repeated evidence that tailored suits can impair judgment. Henning likes company. Even private breakthroughs tend to happen near coworkers, siblings, pets, clients, or somebody waiting to demand details afterward. Taylor is thirty, proudly gay, disciplined, and almost offensively warm. Sam is forty, divorced from Carl, still tied to him through the agency they co-own, and certain she is straight until her interest in Taylor stops accepting euphemisms. Irritation becomes trust; trust becomes desire. Desire, once admitted, is almost the easy part. The harder work is letting that desire alter lives already crowded with obligations.

Ellie, Sam’s younger sister, changes what competence can accomplish. Her stage-one triple-negative breast-cancer diagnosis brings chemotherapy, scans, hair loss, surgery, exhaustion, and the strange administrative labor of illness into the same book that contains flirtatious stretching and jokes about Chicken. Henning explains in the acknowledgments that her wife, Vera, was diagnosed with breast cancer in January 2025 and that Sam and Taylor’s story came forward during that period of fear. The personal origin does not make the cancer material automatically successful, and the novel occasionally presses its awareness message too hard. What makes the strand matter is not borrowed seriousness but the pressure it puts on Sam’s preferred role: the woman who handles things. Cancer gives her a problem that cannot be solved by leadership, money, planning, or a sufficiently elegant presentation deck.

The question that catches Sam unprepared is Ellie’s: “Who will support you?” Sam’s answer is practically a job description. Ellie is sick, so Ellie gets care. Sam is strong, so Sam provides it. There is something admirable in that division of labor, and something punishing. Sam has made usefulness so central to her identity that needing anything herself begins to feel like misconduct.

Rather than explain this to her, Taylor notices it through Sam’s body. During one session, Sam talks about chemotherapy while lying prone for a stretch. Taylor senses that the position has made the disclosure too exposed. She stops, brings Sam upright, changes the stretch, and only then proposes what she jokingly calls “Sam Therapy”: Friday sessions after Ellie’s treatments, with movement, trail walks, coffee, and room to talk or not talk. The sequence is the point. Taylor changes Sam’s posture before she changes the conversation.

Inside that little ritual, repetition becomes courtship. Workout, teasing, stretch, check-in: the pattern stays recognizable while its emotional charge changes. A routine meant to make Sam physically stronger becomes one of the few places where she can stop performing strength. Taylor still corrects form, chooses repetitions, and pushes past the moment Sam would happily bargain for mercy. Her care is not passive or saintly. At its best, it leaves Sam with more choice than she had when the hour began.

Put that test against the other relationships and the book sharpens. Kelly-Anne, Sam and Ellie’s wealthy mother, loves her daughters and keeps attaching instructions to the love. Carl treats former intimacy as continuing access to Sam’s attention, labor, business, and decisions. Taylor’s father made family membership conditional on heterosexual conformity. Henning is less interested in sorting people into those who care and those who do not than in what their care permits. Does the person receiving it become more herself, or more useful to somebody else?

After years of Kelly-Anne siding with Carl, Sam finally hears her mother admit that she thought she could “fix” him and, through him, repair Sam’s life. Sam answers, “We just need you to see us as we are.” Kelly-Anne keeps the thesis from becoming too tidy because her interference is not counterfeit love. She does love Sam. She has also done damage while believing that love entitled her to redesign a daughter. Henning is better when she allows both facts to remain in the room.

Plenty of Taylor’s sentences arrive wearing protective comedy. Anxiety becomes a worm, arousal a firebomb, hard-won happiness a dragon guarding a cave of gold. The metaphors are deliberately a little ridiculous, and that is why they suit her. She does not joke because nothing hurts; she jokes at the exact point where hurt might otherwise pin her down. Sam begins with a more managerial vocabulary: plans, leverage, detail, consequences, classifications. Taylor makes feeling survivable by making it funny. Sam makes feeling manageable by making it exact.

And then “specifically” changes jobs. At first it belongs to Sam’s habitual precision, a word Taylor notices and starts returning to her. Later it moves into flirtation. When Sam finally names her attraction, her language contracts instead of expanding: “With you. Specifically, you.” Two clipped fragments do more than a paragraph of identity explanation could. The pause after “you” matters almost as much as the repetition. Sam’s usual precision no longer closes a question; it exposes one new part of herself while refusing to turn Taylor into evidence for a comprehensive identity theory. The adverb that once narrowed definitions now narrows desire. Sam is not solving women as a category. She is choosing this woman. That economy is especially welcome because elsewhere Henning tends to explain what a scene already knows.

Directness, though, is where Henning’s prose sometimes begins charging interest. She names feelings, confirms motives, clarifies boundaries, and often supplies reassurance before uncertainty has had much time to misbehave. Taylor’s close-third narration is especially prone to the second thought after the useful thought: a comic metaphor lands, then the feeling beneath it is restated; a look is understood, then internally glossed. Sam’s sections are somewhat cleaner because her analytic temperament makes such explanatory habits feel native to her. A scene may already have made its point through gesture or dialogue and then receive an internal sentence translating it into certainty. The habit fits Sam almost suspiciously well: both character and narration dislike leaving important things open to misinterpretation.

If that urge occasionally overprotects the reader, the book has earned part of the impulse. Taylor has been misread by her father and has misread parts of her brothers’ lives in return. Sam has mistaken accommodation for loyalty. Kelly-Anne has preferred an imagined daughter to the woman in front of her. In this world, saying the correct thing can repair something real. Naming harm matters. Asking what someone needs matters. The prose weakens only when clarity starts behaving like insurance and a scene that has already landed receives one more explanation in case the reader somehow missed the runway.

Mikey’s reunion with Taylor is stronger because Henning leaves a little mess on the floor. Taylor finally tells her brother what his apparently enviable Cape Town life has looked like from Florida: their father rejected her for being gay; their mother eventually left; her brothers appeared to inherit education, homes, cars, and a family business while Taylor built herself elsewhere. She has fought for happiness, she says, and now guards it “like a goddamn dragon in front of its cave of gold.” The image is funny, overbuilt, and armed. So is Taylor.

In Mikey’s account, those gifts also worked as leashes. Their father used money to purchase obedience; employment in the family company kept the sons under his authority; the freedom Taylor experienced as abandonment was something Mikey sometimes envied. It is one of the few late revelations that makes an old grievance larger instead of merely resolving it. He does not tell Taylor she was wrong to feel thrown away. She was. Nor does his story excuse years of thin contact. The new information simply adds another injured child to a history Taylor had understood largely through her own exclusion. What changes is not the truth of her wound but the completeness of the story she built around it. Their hug opens a door. It does not do archival work.

That patience evaporates around Carl. He begins as a recognizable post-divorce problem: ex-husband, co-owner, family favorite, source of professional friction, possessor of just enough legitimate access to remain infuriating. By the last act he is easier to eject – sexually crude, professionally reckless, openly misogynistic, finally homophobic. When Sam hands him Klikd and says, “By giving you Klikd, I’m taking my freedom,” the release feels good. It also feels pre-cleared. Henning has burned nearly every bridge that might have made leaving morally complicated.

Romance itself presents a harder problem because the book sees the asymmetry before it decides love can survive it. Taylor and Xavier have an “Ick Rule” against sleeping with clients precisely because trainers receive unusual access to bodies, confidence, self-image, and vulnerability. The American Council on Exercise’s Code of Ethics explicitly requires fitness professionals to maintain clear professional boundaries. Taylor is NASM-certified, not ACE-certified, so the code is industry context rather than her governing rule, but the concern Henning gives Taylor is real rather than prudish decoration.

Once attraction becomes reciprocal, sincerity does most of the ethical work. Sam pays Taylor. Taylor directs her body, monitors her progress, becomes a confidante, then becomes the woman Sam wants. That sequence matters because Henning has already made Taylor unusually good at reading Sam’s physical and emotional states. The same sensitivity that makes her an excellent trainer and an attractive partner is also what makes the boundary worth taking seriously. The paid arrangement eventually ends, but before that the novel mostly treats professional asymmetry as something mutual desire can outrun. No romance needs a licensing hearing, and Sam is hardly powerless. Still, the discomfort should remain. Taylor’s best quality is her ability to make room without taking it, and the trainer-client setup means she begins with more authority inside that room than romance can simply dissolve.

Past the end of Chapter Thirteen, Henning suddenly trusts white space. Taylor and Sam have had sex; they are naked, playful, satisfied, headed toward more; Chicken has tactfully fled. Then the chapter ends. Blank space. A new heading. Sam is beside Ellie while chemotherapy begins. Henning does not insert a tonal airlock between pleasure and medical dread. The page does the cutting.

On the other side of that cut, both scenes become stranger. One body has just become a site of appetite, discovery, and pleasure; another is being made sick in the hope of remaining alive. Henning is not arguing that desire defeats mortality. She is refusing the tidier idea that illness cancels everything around it. Ellie can be frightened and funny. Sam can be terrified for her sister and newly astonished by her own body. The book is often broad in tone, but here the breadth becomes exact because nothing is allowed to wait its turn.

Underneath that juxtaposition runs the novel’s most persuasive language of change. Sam’s muscles reveal how much she sits and clenches; Ellie’s treatment makes fear visible through hair loss, fatigue, nausea, surgery, and pain; Taylor runs when thought becomes unmanageable. The women stretch, sweat, ache, drive, drink coffee, sit beside infusion bags, touch, withdraw, and touch again. Sam experiences attraction bodily before she has a vocabulary for it. Even sex matters less as proof that the couple belongs together than as Sam’s first sustained experience of wanting without immediately correcting the want. Bodies here are not reliable because they are pure or instinctive; Ellie’s body is terrifyingly vulnerable to disease, and training cannot make anybody invulnerable. They are reliable because they keep returning the novel from inspirational language to consequence. Whenever Henning keeps “healing” this physical, the word avoids becoming a slogan.

Late in the novel, Sam gives up on rescuing Klikd from Carl and builds NuVue instead. Taylor does not recover an intact childhood family; she lets Mikey begin a different adult relationship with her. Kelly-Anne does not become harmless; she starts, awkwardly, correcting herself. Ellie finishes chemotherapy and undergoes a double mastectomy without the Epilogue pretending surgery closes the medical story. Even the romance’s domestic future is framed less as moving into Sam’s existing life than as deciding what kind of shared life the two women want to make. Henning repeatedly chooses the new arrangement over the restored old one. That pattern gives the busy final chapters more coherence than their individual reversals always deserve.

Of course, she then furnishes the new arrangement with almost alarming enthusiasm. NuVue prospers. Loyal colleagues follow Sam. A coveted client returns. Kelly-Anne improves. Mikey apologizes and gives his coming son Taylor’s name. Ellie has a ready-made recovery circle. Sam and Taylor move toward cohabitation and engagement while secondary couples start blinking on for future installments. A romance owes pleasure; Henning sometimes includes installation, maintenance, and the extended warranty.

Shelter is where that generosity becomes more than reassurance. Taylor’s Bayshore condo initially looks like ordinary rom-com luck until we learn that Myrtle inherited the property, does not need full market rent, and deliberately charges Taylor less because Taylor once needed somewhere stable to land. The detail quietly punctures Taylor’s mythology of solitary self-reliance. She built a life through effort. She also built it inside a room somebody chose not to monetize as aggressively as she could have. By the end, when Myrtle suggests the condo should go to someone else who needs the same break and Taylor thinks of River, assistance becomes transferable. Taylor can “pay it forward” because she finally recognizes that independence was never the absence of help.

Despite its excesses, “Specifically, You” earns an 82/100, or 4/5 Goodreads stars. Henning overexplains feelings that have already landed, makes Carl increasingly convenient to hate, gives Sam’s late discovery of desire less retrospective disturbance than it might have carried, and packs the Epilogue with enough security to make uncertainty briefly look endangered. But the novel is stronger than its rom-com furniture suggests because its best question is narrower than “Can love heal?” It is closer to this: what kind of help leaves another person more herself?

Even Sam’s first correction looks different by the end. She begins by naming the vehicle correctly while almost entirely misreading the human situation in front of her. Taylor does not teach her to become less precise. She teaches her where precision belongs. By the final “You’ll always be my home,” shelter has meant cheap rent, coffee, stretched muscles, a chemo chair, an offered room, a body beside another body. The most specific kindness in “Specifically, You” is not getting the noun right. It is learning to recognize the person before you correct it.

[Brigitte]

Read if you like:
- A bit of an age gap (40 / 30)
- Bossy business vs. sporty bubbly bright
- No 3rd act break-up
- A bit of smashing down on misogyny
- Hot spicy open door-scenes
Sam Fairchild is recently divorced and looking to get healthier and in shape. She signed up with a personal trainer, but doesn’t really click yet. The PT even refers to her ass Grumpalot towards her best friend and also collegue. So she asks her friend Taylor Thomas to give it a try. Taylor is openly lesbian, loves her work as a personal trainer and is willing to take that extra step to help her clients fysically but also make sure they are in a good mental shape. She has a strict rule though: Don’t fall in love and start dating your clients. So what do you do, when you crush hard for that stunning bossy older lady who books even more sessions per week with you?
At first Sam is resistant against the heavy work-out and diet scheme that Taylor puts her in. Only wine in the weekends is a hard bite for her. But she is persistent on getting back into shape and into feeling good inside her skin, so she shows up for their 5/6 am sessions (respect!) and starts to develop an interest in Taylor herself. Then when she receives the news about her younger sister having breast cancer, Sam’s getting emotional. Taylor notices immediately and takes her for outdoor training sessions, but also checking in with her mentally. Creating a safe space to out her worries towards Taylor. And that makes Sam fall for Taylor even faster.
I loved this part. As a young breastcancer-survivor myself (18 years ago at age 29) I know how important it can be to have someone besides you. But it can also take a toll on your loved ones. It's important that they have someone they can out their worries and their fears to. Because they can't out them to you as a patient.

It was good to read how Taylor took care for Sam and also trying to maintain the professional boundary. She let Sam take the first step. I loved it also how easily Sam settled in with her new developing feelings for a woman. Something that had never happened to her before. Sometimes you can just fall for a person right? It is written that Sam came out as a lesbian, but maybe she’s just bi? I mean she was married to a man. Being bi myself and also discovering that on a later age (25), things can happen and also they don’t have to be labelled. Love is love. And Sam and Taylor are just great together.
Then onto the spice, Sam is a confident woman, her failed marriage didn’t touch that. And she also steps into this new sapphic love with intent. No insecurity there, taking the first kiss, just jump into bed without any doubts, dive into discovery. It’s hot! And so are the spicy scenes. There’s plenty of them and well-written as well.
Special appreciation for the side-characters of this book. Sam’s sister Ellie. Taylor’s friends Candace and queer friend Xavier. They get some nice bits. And halfway in I already was hoping if they maybe get their own love story. So I was delighted that Jeanine announces that this was the first in a series about The Bayshore.

Thanks to #NetGalley for the #ARC!

[Shez]

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️


Specifically, You follows Sam and Taylor through an age gap strangers-to-friends-to-lovers journey, and overall it’s a sweet story about love, relationships, family, and finding your way.


Thank you to Bold Strokes Books for providing me with an advanced reader copy via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review 🫶🏼


I’ll be honest. It took me a little while to get into this one. Some of the dialogue felt a little forced in the beginning, particularly when it was trying to be funny, but thankfully this settled as the story progressed. I found myself becoming much more invested in the characters.


I’m really glad I persevered with this book because there was so much to love. I’m always here for strong minded women, and we can always use more of them!!!


One thing I particularly appreciated was the lack of a third-act breakup. There’s something so refreshing about reading a romance where, once the characters are together, they actually stay together and face their problems as a team rather than throwing away their relationship over a misunderstanding that could have been solved with one conversation (don't get me wrong, I LOVE tension too but this was just refreshing)


But for me, the real standout relationship in this story was Sam and her sister, Ellie. ❤️


Their relationship was written with so much depth, precision and emotional truth that you couldn’t help but feel everything alongside them. The way their experiences were portrayed felt incredibly genuine, and it really made me wonder if the author drew from something particularly close to home when writing this storyline.

Also, shout out to Myrtle. I want to be as nosey and savage as you when I grow up.


Overall, this was a sweet read with strong female characters, a romance I enjoyed watching develop, and a family relationship that really stayed with me.

I’m very glad I persevered with this one. 💕

[Parker]

Rounded up from 3.5 stars.

Thank you to Bold Strokes Books for providing me with an advanced reader copy via NetGalley to be able to read and review.

It took me a little bit to get into the book, but at about the one-third point the pace picked up for me which was also when the romance started to take shape.

Taylor is a personal trainer, she has a tight knit friend group at the gym and has a rule about not getting with a client. Sam, well, she becomes her client...and apparently rules are meant to be broken.

Sam has a lot going on in her life,a bad relationship with her mother, an ex-husband who continues to meddle in her business, and her sister has been diagnosed with cancer.

Taylor becomes a source of support for Sam and gives her a space where she feels safe as she deals with her sister Ellie's cancer treatments.

There were multiple plot points in the book and the author wrapped up each one, but I found the way they were wrapped up to be a little too easy. Like if it was that easy to fix things, then it should have been done years ago.

It was clear from the author's acknowledgements that the cancer diagnosis for Ellie (Sam's sister) was personal. The portrayal of Ellie and her strength was phenomenal, the only think I would have liked was to see more of Ellie and Sam in the last third of the book. It felt like as the romance picked up this story line dropped off.

If you like to read about someone who comes out later in life with a partner who makes it safe for them after a fun meet cute and a slow-ish burn than pick up Specifically, you.

[LezLibros]

This is a typical contemporary romance. I enjoyed the romantic storyline between Sam and Taylor. I think it was well done, for the most part. Sam and Taylor are strong women who are overcoming past hurts and that aspect is written well. However, there is so much extraneous detail and secondary characters that I lost interest multiple times through the course of the book. I usually look forward to the build up of the story but in this case it took more than half of the book to really get into the depth of the story, and by then I wasn’t as invested in the characters. While I appreciated Sam’s openness to learning she was attracted to Taylor, the way she immediately was comfortable kissing and then having sex with Taylor felt a tad too unrealistic for someone who didn’t even think she might be queer. There is a lot going on in this book… many side characters with their own stories and a lot of detail that just felt superfluous. I am sure that with the continuation of the series, the extra details and characters will become more relevant, but for this first book it was a lot to try and keep straight. I loved Taylor’s witty banter and I loved Myrtle! I appreciate the little look into South African lingo the author gives. I am glad that everyone got the ending they deserved.

[Jay]

It took me a bit of time to get into the book but around 30% of the way in, I locked in. The two main characters were really a breath of fresh air. I liked that they genuinely seemed to care about each other and there was a caring towards one another that I don’t often see early in these books. I could see some side characters being introduced in later books and I enjoy that.

And thankfully no breakup in the third act!!! I couldn’t be any happier about that. It had some heavy emotional stuff (medical diagnosis-not a spoiler) but the women were sweet and caring and supportive and honestly it’s nice to have a book with that.

In the vein of “I Really Do” where the characters just get to be good, amazing people. And we need more of those positive vibes in the world. Def pick up for a sweet, slightly spicy, and touching romance.

[Kylie]

Review of Advanced Reader Copy via NetGalley

Specifically, You was a fun lighter side read with a mix of very present supporting characters and memorable MC's!
I actually found myself hoping/wanting more time with them in the sense that I wish more had been fleshed out! I think they could have done with some more slow burn, and time to ruminate on the conflict of pursuing one another. There were times the passage of time was a bit confusing too, until it would directly reference a characters progress (like muscle building/body changes) but that was one of my only complaints!
I also appreciated the South African slang, but didn't appreciate the hand holding definitions of the slang.
Overall I'd say if you're looking for a light read with some loveable characters, this is a fun one to add to your TBR!

[Sue Plant]

would like to thank netgalley and the publisher for letting me read this book

well i have to say i thoroughly enjoyed this book right from the very start and to the last chapter i was capitvated with how i was drawn into the storyline and held

it covers quite a lot of topics from divorce and separation, to estranged parents. breast cancer and attraction

the two main characters are sam fairchild a no nonsense business woman and taylor thomas who is to die for... also a personal trainer.....

these two first meet by accident... literally sam nearly runs taylor over their next meeting is just as embarrassing

but its sam love for her sister that shines through and taylor has the personality that just draws people to her

i was quite sad to finish this book and i look forward to reading more from this author