A review by zauren
How Freaking Romantic by Emily Harding

4.0

How Freaking Romantic follows Bea, a law student , as she tries to find her footing in her life as her friends have all seemed to settle into a different adulthood and her feelings catch for the one person she feels she shouldn’t like - her friend’s ex’s divorce lawyer. 

I say this with the highest compliments, this book read like Ali Hazlewood took a break from STEM books to write a law based romance instead. It was cute and reminiscent of a rom-com. I do think Bea will be a little annoying for some people, and while there were times I wanted her to just say what she felt, she was really relatable too, which is why I never actually got angry with her. The third act break up that is a staple of the romance genre also was pretty well done. I understood why it happened and how, which I appreciated. It didn’t feel forced or out of place. 

Harding also did a good job at laying the ground work for some topics to come back up later, while also making it seem like she might be doing that with other things only to not have them be a conflict or a piece of the ending (IYKYK). 

I didn’t have many issues with the book, but it wasn’t perfect. I didn’t love that side characters were easily forgotten and were really only devices to move the relationship between Bea and Nate forward. I also get why Nate reacted the way he did during the third act break up, but I’m still a little annoyed with him. The ending was also a little cringy, but I will concede that I though the epilogue was one of the better ones I have read (and I usually do not like epilogues). I also said this in a prior review (and this was not at all taken into account for my rating), but I feel like the publisher picked a weird title. It’s not like Bea or Nate don’t curse or anything. It felt very disjointed from the story. So much so that I almost didn’t read this book BECAUSE of the title. I only read it because I wanted to use my BOTM credit last month. Im glad I did. 

All in all, this was a solid book for Harding’s solo debut and I’ll definitely pick up whatever she writes next.