Beach Read

I did what any reasonable adult woman would do when confronted with her college rival turned next-door neighbor. I dove behind the nearest bookshelf.

I did what any reasonable adult woman would do when confronted with her college rival turned next-door neighbor. I dove behind the nearest bookshelf.

"I don't need snowflakes." He kissed me. "As long as there's January."

He fit so perfectly into the love story I’d imagined for myself that I mistook him for the love of my life.

He fit so perfectly into the love story I’d imagined for myself that I mistook him for the love of my life.

I could plot all day, but it didn’t matter if I didn’t fall into the story headfirst, if the story itself didn’t spin like a cyclone, pulling me wholly into itself. That was what I’d always loved about reading, what had driven me to write in the first place. That feeling that a new world was being spun like a spiderweb around you and you couldn’t move until the whole thing had revealed itself to you.

“If you swapped out all my Jessicas for Johns, do you know what you’d get? Fiction. Just fiction. Ready and willing to be read by anyone, but somehow by being a woman who writes about women, I’ve eliminated half the Earth’s population from my potential readers.”

I should’ve stopped telling myself a story and actually looked around at the world.

In books, I’d always felt like the Happily Ever After appeared as a new beginning, but for me, it didn’t feel like that. My Happily Ever After was a strand of strung-together happy-for-nows, extending back not just to a year ago, but to thirty years before. Mine had already begun, and so this day was neither an ending nor a beginning.
It was just another good day. A perfect day. A happy-for-now, so vast and deep that I knew—or rather believed—I didn’t have to worry about tomorrow.

“Entering a relationship is borderline sadomasochistic. Especially when you can get everything you would from a romantic relationship from a friendship, without destroying anyone’s life when it inevitably ends.”
“Everything?” I said. “Sex?”
He arched an eyebrow. “You don’t even need friendship to get sex.”

“You’re sick and twisted, January Andrews,” Gus said. “That’s what I love about you.”
“Oh, that’s what it is.”
“Well,” he said. “One thing. It seemed too crass to invite you to my aunts’ house and then bring up your ass.”

Mom’s first diagnosis taught me that love was an escape rope, but it was her second diagnosis that taught me love could be a life vest when you were drowning.

It felt a little bit like Gus and I were two aliens who’d stumbled into each other on Earth only to discover we shared a native language.

OHMYGOSH. Goodreads Choice Nominees are in and My Reaction Video is up! Don't forget to vote!

OHMYGOSH. Goodreads Choice Nominees are in and My Reaction Video is up! Don't forget to vote!

Two writers agree to spend the summer together competing on a challenge (where one has to write a book in the genre the other specializes in) as an attempt to get out of their writer’s block.



Themes & Tropes: college rival turned next door neighbor, grumpy/sunshine main leads, small town settin

Two writers agree to spend the summer together competing on a challenge (where one has to write a book in the genre the other specializes in) as an attempt to get out of their writer’s block.



Themes & Tropes: college rival turned next door neighbor, grumpy/sunshine main leads, small town setting, second chance hate to love romance, grief (view spoiler)[(death of a parent and infidelity) (hide spoiler)].

“I’ve never met someone who is so perfectly my favorite person.”

“People were complicated. They weren’t math problems; they were collections of feelings and decisions and dumb luck.”

“Bad things don’t dig down through your life until the pit is so deep that nothing good will ever be big enough to make you happy again. No matter how much shit, there will always be wildflowers.”