A review by hennesieinthepages
Delilah Green Doesn't Care by Ashley Herring Blake

lighthearted medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

 
Delilah Green Doesn't Care is a fun, well-paced queer romance novel that I had a great time reading. With all the fan favorite tropes: enemies (?) to lovers, one bed, secret romance, etc; this was a fun read for anyone looking for a good sapphic romance book.

Delilah Green is an independent artist that left her small town of Bright Falls to New York City to pursue her love for photography. She is jaded and uncaring, where relationships are certainly not her forte, and hookups are her bread and butter in the romance department. Who has time for feelings or relationships? Certainly not Delilah.

Claire Sutherland is the complete opposite. She is a single mother with a rocky co-parenting situation with her ex, Josh, and her daughter Ruby is on the cusp of her teenage years, which brings its own set of challenges. She is soft-hearted, and doesn't know how to separate her heart from attraction. Even though one of her best friends, Iris, encourages her to find a hook up just to satiate her, Claire isn't a one night stand kind of girl.

I very much enjoyed the relationship between Claire and Delilah,

and how Claire softens Delilah's heart and breaks down the walls that Delilah (justifiably, in my opinion) has built up around her. I personally wasn't the biggest fans of Iris and Astrid, but their "redemption arcs" of how their behavior changes through the book was nice to read as well. 

This book has loveable characters, even when you don't think you'd really care for them, and it's easy to fall in love with the connection Delilah and Claire have.

Ashley Herring Blake is a phenomenal writer, and how she describes Delilah's blooming feelings for Claire, and Claire's inner turmoil as she handles a secret entanglement and single motherhood made our protagonists feel so real and three-dimensional. I really enjoyed her choice to make this a dual POV novel, and her beautiful writing really lent itself to this.

My only critique is it took me a long time to get on board with the behavioral decisions of Iris, Astrid, and Delilah in the first quarter of the book, particularly Iris and Astrid. While I completely understand the purpose of these decisions, I personally felt some of them were a little unreasonable and a little too far that I felt that Iris and Astrid felt a little irredeemable for a time, and it took me a while to really get to the point where I'd truly care for their stories beyond their relationships to Delilah and Claire. Especially since the next books in this series frame these two as the protagonists of their own stories, I was a little hesitant to want to know more until the end of this book.

I highly recommend this book if you want a sapphic adult romance novel to enjoy, you will not want to put this book down.