An Unexpected Kind of Love

The story is so good with a mixture of emotions, guilt, sadness, love, lust, and romance. The love story of bookseller Aubrey in London and an American actor Blake. They start loving each other so soon and that creates some doubt in Aubrey whether this will result in another heartbreak as Blake will soon return to the US. There are a lot of twists and turns. I really loved the way Blake expressing his love before strangers in the station singing a song for Aubrey. As an actor, he wants more opportunities to become a lead actor in the industry which he may lose when people come to know he is gay. Throughout the whole story, Blake is such a confident, cool guy but at some point, he wants to live up to societal expectations and he leaves Aubrey which is heartbreaking. I loved the character Lily who was such a good friend of Aubrey. The character Eli and Rayan was also different especially Eli who was the ex of Aubrey and currently in a relationship with Ryan and jealous of Aubrey and Blake.

I loved the narration and the lucid writing which made it a super read. At some point I was happy, at some I was sad and laughing at their jokes. I was traveling with the characters all along in Soho, Cumbria, Manhattan...

The relationship should not be measured on time. The connection we feel and the love, care, and understanding of each other is important which changes one's life.

DNF at around 60%. I tried so hard, I really did.

Reasons I'm DNF-ing this book:

1) It sounds cute and fluffy, but it has a general air of gloom about it. It's just a downer.
2) I didn't get any of the fun “normal person dating a celebrity” vibes/tropes that I wanted.
3) I realised I didn't really care what happened to these characters.
4) The MC (the narrator) is an English guy, but he uses American words and phrases. This drives me insane; how did literally no one (editors, proofreaders?) pick up on this? British people don't use the word “faucet”! They don't say things like, “I don't know where my phone is at”. That's fully American. Ugh. Don't write a book from a British person's POV if you don't know how they speak.

I should have given up after the extremely awkward BJ that happened very early on. So cringe. But I really wanted to give it a chance, because it was supposed to be a gay Notting Hill retelling, and what's not to love about that? Oh well.