Book Smart Kate

Book: 🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Audiobook: 🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 Spice: 🌶️

by @aswinn (March 5, 2024) – Thank you to @berkleyromance and @prhaudio for the free digital and audio advanced copies, below is my honest review. 

Birdie Maxwell was America’s sweetheart until an on-set fight went viral, and her image imploded on the set of her most recent film. Her PR-planned mea culpa landed like a lead balloon, and now she is heading home for the first time in years to escape a media onslaught. But home isn’t entirely what she’d anticipated. Her parents have rented out their house, and her sister is pissed about all the emails Birdie never answered. Birdie can only rely on her best friend, Mona, who has lived across the street since they were twelve. While cleaning out her childhood bedroom, Birdie finds an anonymous love letter from an ex written years ago. The letter sparks an idea…can she rehabilitate her image by starring in her own real-life rom-com? 

Mona’s twin brother, Elliot, is a war reporter back in the States and is skiing on thin ice with his editor. If he can bring in a popular puff-piece series about his sister’s best friend finding the letter’s author, he may return to the newsroom’s good graces. Thus starts a chaotic road trip in a dilapidated camper, hiding from paparazzi and tracking down Birdie’s exes. The only problem? No one has ever loved Birdie as much as Elliot…and Birdie’s always secretly loved Elliot.

This book is fun, funny, and so adorable. All of the secret pining. The regret and hidden feelings. Elliot’s pain as he meets all of Birdie’s famous exes, Birdie just wishing the letter would be from Elliot. In many celebrity romances, you may be initially compelled to play a tiny violin for “famous people’s problems”; however, Birdie is more real than many celebrity FMCs, genuinely reflects on her role in getting to her current situation, and manages a lot of really healthy personal growth. It is a slow-burn, road trip, sibling’s best friend, childhood friends to lovers, celebrity romance with a pinch of enemies to lovers.

The audiobook narrators do a great job of bringing the story to life with the humor and frustration the characters navigate for most of the book.