Sophie Sullivan | How To Love Your Neighbor

The Book:

How To Love Your Neighbor by Sophie Sullivan
Published January 18th 2022 by St. Martin’s Griffin
Date read: February 7, 2022

The Characters:

Grace
Noah

Buy it on Bookshop.org | Amazon

The Plot (from Goodreads):

Interior Design School? Check. Cute house to fix up? Check.

Sexy, grumpy neighbor who is going to get in the way of your plans? Check. Unfortunately.

Grace Travis has it all figured out. In between finishing school and working a million odd jobs, she’ll get her degree and her dream job. Most importantly, she’ll have a place to belong, something her harsh mother could never make. When an opportunity to fix up—and live in—a little house on the beach comes along, Grace is all in. Until her biggest roadblock moves in next door.

Noah Jansen knows how to make a deal. As a real estate developer, he knows when he’s found something special. Something he could even call home. Provided he can expand by taking over the house next door–the house with the combative and beautiful woman living in it.

With the rules for being neighborly going out the window, Grace and Noah are in an all-out feud. But sometimes, your nemesis can show you that home is always where the heart is.

The Review:

I LOVE a good fixer-upper story! The home improvement setting is one of my absolute favorites.

The side characters in How To Love Your Neighbor were really what made this story for me. I adored Morty and Tilly, and I wanted to be part of Grace and Noah’s friend group once their two sets of friends combined.

I loved the interior design scenes, especially the challenge that Grace set up with all their friends. What a fun way to get two houses completed quickly!

What surprised me was that for such good characters, the banter between the MCs was a little lacking. Their exchanges seemed overly monosyllabic. In multiple instances, all Noah said to Grace was “you’re cute”. This would be fine once or twice, but after a while it seemed like it was just the only compliment he could think of. There were a few interactions where they were supposed to be flirting, but only used three-word sentences consisting of single-syllable words.

I also would’ve liked more character development and resolution of the MC’s pasts. No spoilers here, but…

Click for my thoughts

SPOILER: everything was just kind of swept under the rug. Noah decided to just let the money go that he had in the warehouses instead of confronting his father. Grace’s mother just gave up after Grace said she wouldn’t pay her and Noah’s check bounced. It would have been nice to get more conflict resolution there.

Overall, a cute, fun story, but not one that blew me away.

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