A review by lezreadalot
The Safest Place by Lily Seabrooke

4.0

“I like you as you are, and I like you as who you’ll be tomorrow. You’re enough. I promise.”

These days, I'm really used to being annoyed by the conflict in 50% of romance novels, because they're so often completely contrived and read as unnecessary/overdramatic rather than emotional. So it's rare and really gratifying to have a source of conflict that just feels organic, real, and totally necessary, even though a lot of it hinges on miscommunication (my least favourite thing). This was so good, a hugely satisfying romance in the way that it followed some tropes and didn't follow others.

Grace is from a very strict, very conservative family, and her parents are determined to see her and all of her brothers married off. She has a temper, jumps to conclusions, and can be super prickly, but she's really yearning to find love. Lena is almost terminally shy, is used to people taking advantage of her, and at the beginning of the book, is having a lesbian awakening. She and Grace get off to a bad start, as Grace assumes Lena is trying to trap her shy brother into marriage, but at the same time, they unknowingly strike up a correspondence of anonymous letters. This romance was just so so cute; an opposites attract affair that ended with both women learning and growing from each other.

In the beginning, I was getting super frustrated with Grace and the way she jumped to conclusions; it seemed like a lazy setup for conflict/goading the book into a certain direction. Books do it all the time; a character will misunderstand something that seems perfectly clear, and it'll create this huge blow-up/conflict. So I was annoyed, until I realised that that tendency was actually a part of Grace's personality, a flaw that she would be working on as things progressed. And from there, I really like the directions that the book took. It's about loneliness, self-discovery, and growth. Both our heroines go on little journeys with their sexualities, and it was adorable. They ended up having the best chemistry, and there are so many cue moments. I also really appreciated that there were certain things that COULD have been blown out of proportion, and they weren't.

The plot with the anon letters could have been better fleshed out/more impactful. The way it started also wasn't the most credible. Otherwise, this was really lovely, very realistic, with the fun, engaging writing that I've gotten used to from Seabrooke. Major kudos.