Don't Want You Like a Best Friend: A Novel (The Mischief & Matchmaking Series, 1)

I'm at a point in my life where romantic novels are just not my thing. I've become cynical of romance or anything resembling a romantic relationship between a man and a woman. So when my bookclub picked a romance novel you can imagine I wasn't super excited to read it. I did commit myself to reading the monthly picks because I enjoy the social aspects of the club but also because the club picks books because they represent the voice of a community that isn't always included or made to feel welcomed and I personally love this aim. So, I figured even if I didn't enjoy this read I would definitely enjoy the discussion after. Good characters will pull me into a novel pretty quickly and that's exactly what happened with this one. Gwen and Beth (but mostly Gwen) is someone you fall into love with quickly. She's tenacious, smart, witty, fiercely independent, and hilarious. Even I, a straight woman, developed a little bit of a crush on her. She's the type of woman that you want as your best friend at the very least. Beth is also a very lovable character, I actually see a lot of myself in her. She's constantly trying to make everyone else around her happy, especially her mother. She is even willing to live her own life miserably so that her mother may be comfortable. She's definitely somebody that, at least at the beginning of the novel, doesn't really know her own self because she's always been made to bend to others wants and whims, namely her father and other men in her life. When these two women meet they make easy friends. They're both very smart, and witty and they make each other laugh. It's a really beautiful friendship, the type of friendship every woman needs at least once in her life. They each make the season bearable for the other. From my own experiences some of the best relationships are based on friendship. It seems the better friends couples are, the better partners they can be as well. So when we find that both Gwen and Beth have crushes on each other you definitely root for their happy ending. It being Victorian London, it didn't seem likely, but you root for it nonetheless. The fact that Gwen's father and Beth's mother are long-lost-loves from their own first season is another layer that the girls have to navigate, and the fact that they figure out a way to use it to their advantage adds a humorous note to this otherwise quite sad situation. I'm not going to spoil any more of the story but I will say that the ending, and the fact that it leads into the second novel is definitely the *chefs kiss* of this novel. It was brought to my attention when I was about halfway through, that the title is a reference to a Taylor Swift song, and knowing this made the second novels title make a lot of sense. I'm not a Swifty, but I do like her music and respect her as a woman and human especially, so I'm not mad about the references. There might be more in the book, I'm just completely oblivious to them. I really do love the author's writing, she writes very beautifully and descriptively but is not long-winded. Some of the novels set in this period can describe a bush for a whole page, and there are typically a lot of 'quivering busoms' and, well I'm sure you can hear my eyes roll in that last sentence so, I really appreciate how I was able to picture everything happening in this novel but I didn't have to read a whole page about foliage at any point. I want to pre-order the second novel in this series, because I definitely want to know how it ends. It's such a nice story, and a romance novel that actually shows a healthy relationship, it's just a really nice change. And I think mostly for that reason, I will for sure be looking out for more from this author in general.