Review: "Truly Enough" by J.J. Hale

 

Truly Enough by J.J. Hale
Published June 2023 via Bold Strokes Books
★★★

It's a bread-and-butter classic: friends-to-lovers, fake dating, and a little bit of a firefighter romance thrown into the mix. Can't argue with that! This was sweet and fast—a little too much "telling" in places (they are nothing if not self-aware), but I'll very gladly take self-aware characters over ones who constantly miscommunicate.

Some positives:
- Truly Enough is the second in a series, but it is (...truly...) a standalone, so you're safe jumping in wherever.

- The characters are really good about having honest conversations—there is some level of miscommunication, but it's limited, and there's a much higher level of honesty. And consent! Enthusiastic consent!

- I just read another fake-dating romance in which the characters sort of...forget to have sensible conversations about how the whole thing is going to work, and more to the point how they're going to get away with it ending, so I love that that's something that Robyn and Lexi think about from the beginning...even if they don't always have satisfactory answers.

- Interesting to see possible ADHD as a plot point—again, I just read another f/f romance (...not a fake-dating one this time...) in which that was a factor. I like seeing neurodiversity and varied identities starting to play more of a role in romance, and it looks like there might be another rise in those subplots at the moment.

Some neither-positive-nor-negative-romance-novel-specific questions:
- How often does fake dating happen in real life? Tell me. Have you ever fake-dated someone? Did you fall madly in love with them (or their sibling or best friend or mortal enemy)? How did it turn out? Because this is one of those things, like self-made billionaires, that seem to come up a lot more often in romance novels than in real life.

- How often do people in real life swear off love forever because their parents or grandparents had a great love, and then one person died and the other is sad, and now the younger person is like "I CANNOT BEAR THAT PAIN"? I've seen people swear off romance because they're heartbroken (especially people on dating apps—in particular, men who have been "burned before"), but never because of secondhand grief. Except in romance novels. Again, tell me: have you seen this? I am so curious.

- What is the firefighting equivalent of a lesbian U-Haul joke? There must be something about bringing a fire truck to a second date.

What I wanted more of:
- This one's a short list: firefighting! Fire! This is as conventional as my reading tastes get: when there is a lesbian firefighter in a romance novel, god damn it, I want firefighting. (I don't want to date a firefighter, thanks. I am too anxious a person for that. But in a book? Send the fire hoses in to put out the heat. Wait, no, that metaphor might go in weird directions...) I fully recognize that this is a me problem, and that firefighters do all sorts of things other than fighting fires, and that if every firefighter romance ever had dramatic blazing buildings, they'd all start to run together, and the proportions of fires in romance would start to rival the proportions of self-made billionaires in romance novels. Or...or it would just become climate apocalyptic, which I'm less interested in reading, actually. But as far as the more conventional parts of my reading tastes go, if I'm going to read a book with a (swoon) lesbian firefighter, then I'd like to see turnout gear, a fireman's pole, a ravaged structure or two. Otherwise, the firefighter who cannot risk love because she has seen the pain of love lost...she might as well be an accountant who cannot risk love because her parents' marriage was ruined by her accountant father's lack of work-life balance.

(A short list, I said. Not a short opinion.)

Oh well. Still burns fun and fast. May the flames of firefighter romance never die...

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.