Take a photo of a barcode or cover
marie_mn 's review for:
We Could Be So Good
by Cat Sebastian
emotional
hopeful
In a way, it was what I hoped it would be: a very slow and soft and quiet romance.
The author knows how to write those and excels at creating complex yet lovable characters. Both Andy and Nick felt real and well-developed from the start and I liked them a lot, I rooted for them, I felt for them. Of course, they did have their struggles, but they worked through them like the adults they were without behaving like 12-year-olds, which is quite rare in a romance at this point.
So that part of the story was very well done.
But this book also has almost 400 pages. So you either have to fill them with a nice balance of romance and plot, or you really have to make the characters and their problems so interesting and the pacing so flawless that it won’t get repetitive and boring at some point. And since this had basically no plot only romance as the development of Andy and Nicks’s relationship from work acquaintances to friends to roommates to best friends to lovers was the main point, the characters had to carry the story on their own. And that didn’t always work imo.
I read the second book in this series (You Should Be So Lucky) first, and it’s very similar to this one, so I automatically started to compare the two. Which made it very obvious to me that my issue with this one was the pacing. <i>You Should Be So Lucky</i> flows nicely, even though it also has little to no plot (besides the romance) and mainly focuses on the relationship between the two main characters, which also developed very slowly. This one however had so much inner monologue, going on for pages at times, that it got so annoying to me, I started skipping whole pages. It was just too much and felt disruptive to the story.
And the thing is, there was a really interesting side plot at first. Of course, it took the backseat to their budding relationship, but it was there and would’ve worked so well. But then it kind of went nowhere in the end. Yes, I get that Nick did what he did out of love and I liked that a lot, but it kind of made everything concerning this side plot feel like a waste of time.. Like why did I have to read about all that if we’re just dropping it in the end? That could have been handled better and to the advantage of the story.
All of that might sound kind of negative, but it was still a super sweet and soft story overall, which was exactly what I wanted.
The author knows how to write those and excels at creating complex yet lovable characters. Both Andy and Nick felt real and well-developed from the start and I liked them a lot, I rooted for them, I felt for them. Of course, they did have their struggles, but they worked through them like the adults they were without behaving like 12-year-olds, which is quite rare in a romance at this point.
So that part of the story was very well done.
But this book also has almost 400 pages. So you either have to fill them with a nice balance of romance and plot, or you really have to make the characters and their problems so interesting and the pacing so flawless that it won’t get repetitive and boring at some point. And since this had basically no plot only romance as the development of Andy and Nicks’s relationship from work acquaintances to friends to roommates to best friends to lovers was the main point, the characters had to carry the story on their own. And that didn’t always work imo.
I read the second book in this series (You Should Be So Lucky) first, and it’s very similar to this one, so I automatically started to compare the two. Which made it very obvious to me that my issue with this one was the pacing. <i>You Should Be So Lucky</i> flows nicely, even though it also has little to no plot (besides the romance) and mainly focuses on the relationship between the two main characters, which also developed very slowly. This one however had so much inner monologue, going on for pages at times, that it got so annoying to me, I started skipping whole pages. It was just too much and felt disruptive to the story.
And the thing is, there was a really interesting side plot at first. Of course, it took the backseat to their budding relationship, but it was there and would’ve worked so well. But then it kind of went nowhere in the end. Yes, I get that Nick did what he did out of love and I liked that a lot, but it kind of made everything concerning this side plot feel like a waste of time.. Like why did I have to read about all that if we’re just dropping it in the end? That could have been handled better and to the advantage of the story.
All of that might sound kind of negative, but it was still a super sweet and soft story overall, which was exactly what I wanted.