A review by lizanneyoung
They Were Roommates by Dawn Cutler-Tran

3.5

⭐⭐⭐💫

TROPES

💙Friends to Roommates to Lovers

💙Found Family

💙Dual POV

This story is told more in a movie montage-like format, where we are being told everything rather than shown. We zoom through time (several years worth), stopping along the way to see key scenes in Frankie and Diego’s friendship and relationship. I think it’s a fun way to get through time, but I do feel like character development suffered because we rarely saw Frankie and Diego when it wasn’t in regard to each other. We don’t see a ton of their interactions with other people, making it a bit harder to understand who they are outside of the relationship dynamic.

That said, it is a great story about found family, acceptance, and understanding. Diego is a trans man, and a significant portion of his character arc is going through different stages of self-acceptance as he reaches different milestones of his gender euphoria. He certainly receives the most characterization between the two main characters and this was to the story’s benefit. Frankie’s POVs are usually filled with internal dialogue that goes a mile a minute, and as someone who also has that, it was nice to see that in a book.