Booked on a Feeling

• Author: Jayci Lee
• Genre: Romance
• Publication Date: July 26, 2022
• Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin
• Series: A Sweet Mess #3

CONTENT WARNING: anxiety, panic attack

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Griffin for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Jayci Lee’s romcom Booked on a Feeling features an overachieving lawyer. A failing bookstore. A childhood friend. And the chance of a lifetime…

Lizzy “Overachiever” Chung, Esq. has her life mapped out neatly:

* Become a lawyer. Check.

* Join a prestigious law firm. Check.

* Make partner. In progress.

If all goes to plan, she will check off that last box in a couple years, make her parents proud, and live a successful, fulfilled life in L.A. What was not in her plans was passing out from a panic attack during a pivotal moment in her career. A few deep breaths and a four hour drive later, Lizzy is in Weldon for three weeks to shed the burnout and figure out what went wrong. And what better place to recharge than the small California town where she spent her childhood summers with her best friend, Jack Park.

Jack Park didn’t expect to see Lizzy back in Weldon, but now he’s got three weeks to spend with the girl of his dreams. Except she doesn’t know of his decades-long crush on her–and he intends to keep it that way. She’s a high-powered attorney who lives in L.A. and he’s a bookkeeper at his family’s brewery who never left his hometown. He can’t risk their friendship on a long shot. Can he? When Lizzy decides that the local bookstore needs a little revamp, of course, Jack is going to help her bring it back to life. But the more time they spend together, the harder it becomes to ignore there might be more than just friendship among the dusty shelves and books…

Sometimes the path to the rest of your life has been in front of you all along.

I loved The Dating Dare, so I jumped on the chance to read this one, and it definitely didn’t disappoint. Lee has created a whole new cast of characters, and one of my favorite things about series is getting to see cameos of the characters I loved from earlier books popping in and making an appearance.

It’s hard not to love the MCs in this story. Lizzy is a focused, determined, brilliant woman who is an overachiever working hard to make her goals into reality. She also struggles with anxiety, and I loved the emphasis on her use of coping skills as well as medication to manage her anxiety. And Jack is a total cinnamon roll, stuffed into the sexiest body ever. I especially loved that they’re both book lovers, and that so much of the story takes place in a book shop.

The story spends a lot of time talking about figuring out what you really want, which is a huge decision that every one of us faces, and was so easy to identify. There’s so much pressure on us to decide what we want to do with our life right after high school, and then if you aren’t one of the lucky few, there’s this awkward period of reassessment and that’s exactly where the story was set. I could completely identify with where the characters were at, and loved that this was when the story was set. One of my favorite parts is the way that the characters gave each other space to figure out what they wanted before chasing each other down.

At parts, it felt like the story dragged and was a little repetitive, but once it got going, boy it was steamy. The connection between the characters was really good, and I loved how emotionally and sexually charged it was. There’s some mild spice in the story, and I really enjoyed their relationship developing from friends to lovers. In addition, there’s great Korean-American representation, as well as beautifully portrayal of the difficulty of being the child of immigrants, especially when Lizzy’s parents returned to Korea and she stayed in America. It added a new layer of tension to her relationship with them, placing additional stress on her relationship with them, and pressure on her to fulfill the expectation they had for her.

I’m a huge fan of Jayci Lee’s writing, and I’m even more motivated to circle back and check out A Sweet Mess, the first book in this series. This is a story about chasing your dreams, and that’s definitely something I can get down with.