Ten Trends to Seduce Your Bestfriend, an all-new quirky and witty laugh out loud romance from New York Times bestselling author Penny Reid, is now live!
I received this book for free from Social Butterfly PR in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.
Ten Trends to Seduce Your Bestfriend by Penny ReidPublished by Cipher-Naught on April 12, 2022
Genres: Adult Contemporary Romance
Pages: 438
Source: Social Butterfly PR
Format: E-galley
My Rating:
Goodreads
Blurb:
Winnifred Gobaldi and Byron Visser are not best friends.
Yes, they’ve known each other for years, but they’re not even friendly. Winnie considers them more like casual, distant acquaintances who find each other barely tolerable, especially when he’s being condescending (which is all the time).
The truth is, they have nothing in common. She’s a public school science teacher with stars in her eyes, and he’s a pretentious, joyless double PhD turned world-famous bestselling fiction author. She loves sharing her passion for promulgating women in STEM careers and building community via social media, and he eschews all socialization, virtual or otherwise. She’s looking for a side hustle to help pay down a mountain of student debt, and his financial portfolio is the stuff of fiduciary wet dreams. So why are they faking a #bestfriend relationship for millions of online spectators?
When a simple case of tit-for-tat trends between nonfriends leads to a wholly unexpected kind of pretend, nothing is simple. Sometimes, it takes a public audience to reveal the truth of private feelings, and rarely—very rarely—you should believe what you see online.
Ten Trends to Seduce Your Bestfriend is a full-length, complete standalone, adult contemporary romantic comedy.
Fall in love today!
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Excerpt
“This is the video from yesterday.” My stomach did a weird thing at the sight of him, and the sight of me crawling on all fours toward him, and what came after. I blinked away from the replay, before the part where I’d forgotten we were being filmed. “Why would I be mad at you about this? I knew you were filming.”
“Look harder.”
My forehead wrinkled, giving my attention back to her phone. I didn’t know what she wanted me to see, but now the video was repeating and—
“OH MY GOD!” I grabbed the phone. “This—this is—”
“Shh! Yes.” Now Amelia looked around, presumably to make certain none of the Seattleites surrounding us felt a disturbance in the politeness force. “Yes. I recorded it live. I’m so, so, so sorry.”
I leaned forward. “So that means it’s been—”
“Posted since last night. That’s right.” She covered her face again, groaning. “I’m so sorry.”
My eyes caught on the number of views, and I stood from the table, my chair scraping noisily on the linoleum. “ONE MILLION VIEWS?”
“Sorry!” she whispered loudly to someone at a nearby table. “We’ll just—we’re leaving.” Amelia grabbed my laptop and notebook and tilted her head toward the exit. “Time to go, and it was one point three the last time I checked. Now get your bag.”
Numbly, I lowered her phone and grabbed for my backpack and coat, fumbling with the strap. My fingers didn’t seem to work. She walked around the table and placed a hand on my back, helping to usher me out of the quiet area and waiting until we were standing in the hall to say, “I’m so sorry. It was an accident.”
“I can’t . . .” I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t move, I couldn’t speak. One point three million views. What must Byron think? “Oh crap,” I whispered, my gaze swinging around the interior of the library, unable to settle. “What about Byron? Does he know? How is he going to feel about this?”
“I don’t know if he knows. I’ve been trying to call him all morning. He won’t pick up his phone, and I’m frankly a little scared to leave a voice mail. Since he’s not on social media, he might not know.” Stuffing my laptop and notebook into my backpack, Amelia put the strap on my shoulder and took her cell phone from where I still gripped it.
I immediately covered my face like I could hide from this. My cheeks were hot. As much time as I’d spent this morning coming to terms with Jeff’s decisions last night, I’d spent ZERO seconds thinking about my ridiculous reaction to Byron’s performance. I wouldn’t allow myself to think about it. What was the point? He’d been pretending, acting, playing a part, and—as per usual—I’d left the interaction feeling like a fool.
“We have to delete it,” I rasped, my mouth dry, my brain on fire. “Before he sees it and finds out, we have to delete it.”
“No! No. Don’t do that.” She pressed the phone to her chest.
“What? Why not?”
“Think for a second.” She pushed me toward the elevator. “If you delete it, it might become a whole thing. He’s a famous guy who millions of people are starving to know more about. He has no social media and suddenly he’s on TikTok with you? And this isn’t like your lab video from Friday, this is you two together, acting like you’re close friends crushing on each other. We need to call him—together—and tell him. But first we need him to answer his damn phone.” Amelia nodded at her own assertion while stabbing the elevator call button with her index finger.
“Call him? You want to call him together?” Oh God. I didn’t want to call him. I never wanted to talk to him again. “You don’t think he’ll want us to take it down ASAP? Like you said, millions of people want to know about him. Don’t you think he’ll view this as an invasion of privacy?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe?” I flinched back. “I think you mean, most certainly yes.”
“No.” She pulled me by the arm into the elevator and pressed all the right buttons. “We should call him, leave a voice mail together where we tell him exactly what happened, and ask what he wants to do about it. If you take it down, it might create more difficulty for him than if you left it up and let it run its course.”
I covered my face again, leaning against the wall for support. “I can’t believe this is happening.”
“Hey, on the bright side, you have over ten thousand new followers. That’s . . . something.”
I groaned. I would’ve given up every single one of my new followers if it would’ve somehow undone the posting of that video. What a nightmare.
My Review
I’ve been on the edge of my seat waiting to read this one from the first moment the author mentioned it. And then she had to spend a little longer on it because it was really going differently than she’d expected. You know what? I will wait every extra minute I have to for Penny Reid to polish and perfect her books because they are always perfect! I also love how her books feature real people, with real issues, with real types of lives, instead of the perfect people so often featured in romances especially. While I don’t think I’m on the autism spectrum, there are characteristics I know I share with people like Byron. Many of his thoughts and reasons are so similar to my own thoughts and reasons for doing or not doing things. I don’t usually share those with others because I feel like they’d think I was weird, or else tell me I was being dumb to think that way. I’ve even had people call me out on things and tell me I was doing what I know or maybe didn’t realize I was subconsciously doing at times. But Byron was his own type of guy. And I would be like Winnie was at the beginning, so frustrated with him, and thinking he didn’t like her.
Winnie though was another side of me in a way as well. I am also a public school educator. I went from 17 years of being a middle school science teacher, to now being a public school librarian. While she got upset about Byron saying she was underpaid, I agree with him. Although when I first was going to college to be a teacher, I heard the same thing from people all the time about how I shouldn’t be a teacher because of the pay. But I guess I kind of explained it the same way she argued with him about the salary. It was more than just the job similarities between Winnie and I that made me connect with her though. It was how she would just let other people be, and not speak up in order to avoid confrontation for one thing. I know that is something I have got to work on myself. But I did get so mad when when the others called her out on it. Even though I know it was true for the most part. In fact when her friend said she was being selfish for assuming that she’d move out with her boyfriend, um, NO! That’s an obvious next step in any serious relationship, there is no reason she wouldn’t assume that.
One other thing about Winnie that was a bit that hit me hard, was when she said she needed to “let the idea of him go because that’s what he was. An idea.” That is my problem. I develop crushes similar to what she had on her friend Jeff. They just seem like the perfect person for me. But they’re not really interested in me, or I’m basing it off of the very surface level things I know about them. That phrasing, though, the just an idea thing, just perfectly put.
At times the romance parts, their relationship was so hard to read. But that’s in a good way! Don’t get me wrong! However I feel it was real to do it that way. And so many other real parts to this. How she didn’t like the taste of what she swallowed during a certain scene. Then that made her self-conscious and not want him to do the same thing for her because of it. Yes. I get that so much. Oh my gosh, I could go on and on and gush about all the realistic parts of this, all the perfection of this story, but I am going to stop. I am going to just tell you that you need to read this one yourself. It is a little long, true, but every part is worth every bit of time you spend reading it.
About the Author
Penny Reid is the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling author of the Winston Brothers and Knitting in the City series. She used to spend her days writing federal grant proposals as a biomedical researcher, but now she writes kissing books. Penny is an obsessive knitter and manages the #OwnVoices-focused mentorship incubator / publishing imprint, Smartypants Romance. She lives in Seattle Washington with her husband, three kids, and dog named Hazel.
Connect with Penny
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PennyReidWriter/
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Twitter: @ReidRomance
Mailing List: http://pennyreid.ninja/newsletter/
Website: www.pennyreid.ninja
Giveaway
To celebrate the release of Ten Trends to Seduce Your Bestfriend, Penny has an incredible GIVEAWAY!
Enter now for a chance to win a bundle of incredible signed books>>> https://bit.ly/3kcOUqP
I need to get this book! I have read many of her books, but none lately.
This was really good, but really long too!