For You & No One Else (Say Everything #3) by Roni Loren
This was a five-star book for me until the final 10% of the book and here is why.
(beware of possible spoilers ahead)
Books one and two in this series have an amazing message, great complicated characters, and a black moment and resolution worthy of proper adult relationships. This book was on track to be the same.
At its core, this is a "friends-with-benefits-fall-for-each-other" trope book to such a degree that Loren herself calls it out somewhere in the middle of the book. When the "black moment" arrives and it is about the fact that one of the MCs caught feelings for the other and they are not ready to commit, I was poised to see how this book, with its lineage of subverting the black moment, would gracefully get out of this bind. And it did. The character who started the book very interested in a husband, marriage, and 2 kids kind of life, reevaluated their priorities and acknowledged the fact that the societal trappings of the pageantry of marriage are different from being committed to someone. (How awesome is this realization!)
But that is where the book takes a turn I didn't understand. Instead of the two characters developing and growing a relationship based on their goals and needs without labels, they spend a few pages deciding to be together and immediately jump to finding labels sexy. The entirety of the epilogue is literally a parade of labels. Boyfriend, fiancee, husband, father in a literal Instagram feed.
I am not saying that people can't be happy with or without the labels, but this book so eloquently explained how different being committed and being bound can feel and then didn't give me enough time to believe that for these two people the two things are not mutually exclusive.
It felt like the emotional arc for at least one of the MCs was off-page a little too much and so the ending came out of the left field for me.
I realize that this is a romance and HEA is the goal, but I would have loved to see an unconventionally wonderful HEA as opposed to the very things they were both trying to get away from.
It feels like this is the end of the series and there is a nice wrap-up where you get to see everyones' futures from the other two books. The series is solid, and I would still highly recommend it, I would just want to know if anyone else got this vibe. -Sky
