Reviews with content warning for Abandonment - Window Shopping

“You’ve given me a weird bow tie kink and nothing else is appealing now. It’s terrible. All I was thinking when that guy offered to buy me a drink was. Why? He doesn’t have any stories about Aunt Edna. What can I possibly get out of this?”

“Someday soon I’ll be healthy enough to be my own knight.”

“You get to take advantage of your own happiness. You’re allowed to keep it if they don’t want it.”

“I’m not abandoning you. But I’m not abandoning myself for you, either.”

⭐️⭐️⭐️.5/5
🌶️🌶️🌶️

🎄 Dual POV
🎄 Insta-love
🎄 Workplace romance
🎄 Growth in the MCs; explicitly details the journey towards healthy communication & boundary setting 🙌🏻
🎄 Steamy 🔥
🎄 Quick read
🎄 Epilogue

⚠️ Toxic friendship, toxic family relationships, abandonment, imprisonment (in past), impact of imprisonment on mental health, robbery/gun violence (in past), panic attack (on page), workplace discrimination, claustrophobia.

Content Warnings

marylinaris's review against another edition

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emotional funny hopeful inspiring medium-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No

3.0

I’m a little torn on this one.

On one side this was a quick, fun read. It has a nice grumpy/sunshine romance, an abundance of steamy scenes, and an overall enjoyable plot.

Stella was an interesting character, besides the obvious romantic plot she has to deal with her past jail time, re-entering society and a toxic friendship throughout the book. While these topics were continuously brought up, they are tackled on a very individual level and I felt like both were wrapped up a little too fast and too neatly in the end.

The side characters, of whom there were only a small handful, made for good additions to the story. His family made for a nice side villains, Aiden found more confidence and respect of his employees through. I also enjoyed the little romance plot between to of the side characters, that helped out couple along without taking up too much space or overshadowing the main plot.

Where it gets tricky for me is Aiden.

He is a lovable dork with a wild sexy side. The moment he sees Stella for the first time, he instantly falls for her and would probably score high in an insta-love competition. Based on a ten minute conversation, which was also their first meeting he ends up hiring her over far more qualified people, cool, I can let that slide in the name of romance. I can even let a boss/employee relationships slide, well, normally. But here the constant reinforcement that their relationship is inappropriate was distracting. While Stella also brought this up, it’s mentioned during Aiden’s POV to a nauseating degree, that would be great - he is the boss, the one with the power after all - if it didn’t seem like that was part of the turn on for him. There was just something very unsexy about them making out to a constant stream of thoughts about the inappropriateness of their actions.

Content Warnings

aqtbenz's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

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