Name: Sarah N's review of Read Between the Lines by Rachel Lacey
Item: Read Between the Lines
Rating: 3.5
Author: Sarah N

Rachel Lacey

From award-winning author Rachel Lacey comes a playful romance about a Manhattan bookstore owner and a reclusive author who love to hate--and hate to love--each other. Books are Rosie Taft's life. And ever since she took over her mother's beloved Manhattan bookstore, they've become her home too. The only thing missing is her own real-life romance like the ones she loves to read about, and Rosie has an idea of who she might like to sweep her off her feet. She's struck up a flirty online friendship with lesbian romance author Brie, and what could be more romantic than falling in love with her favorite author? Jane Breslin works hard to keep her professional and personal lives neatly separated. By day, she works for the family property development business. By night, she puts her steamier side on paper under her pen name: Brie. Jane hasn't had much luck with her own love life, but her online connection with a loyal reader makes Jane wonder if she could be the one. When Rosie learns that her bookstore's lease has been terminated by Jane's family's business, romance moves to the back burner. Even though they're at odds, there's no denying the sparks that fly every time they're together. When their online identities are revealed, will Jane be able to write her way to a happy ending, or is Rosie's heart a closed book?

Read Between the Lines

Larissa Cruz

Bunnhi

Ending and the last 100 or so pages were great! At first it was a bit slow paced, but not terribly slow.

I do not know if this is my kind of genre tho, romance in general

Sarah N

Ending and the last 100 or so pages were great! At first it was a bit slow paced, but not terribly slow.

I do not know if this is my kind of genre tho, romance in general

🦇 Read Between the Lines Book Review 🦇

❝ Her online crush, her real-life crush, and the woman who’d crushed her dreams were all the same person, and her mind was still struggling to snap all the pieces into place. ❞

❓ #QOTD What's your favorite 90s romcom? ❓

🦇 Books have always been a part of Rosie Taft's life. That happens when your late mother once owned a Manhattan bookstore you've now inherited. The only thing missing from Rosie's life: a romance to rival the ones she reads about. Though she has a flirty online friendship with lesbian romance author "Brie," they've never met; never turned those flirtatious remarks into deep, romantic gazes in reality. Jane Breslin works for her father's property development business by day, but by night, she lets her hair down and steamy side out as a romance writer. When the business terminates Rosie's bookstore lease, their world's collide and online identities are revealed. Can Jane pen her way back into Rosie's heart for a happy ending?

💜 By some coincidence, I watched You've Got Mail for the first time a few months ago. There's something about the sweet simplicity of 90s rom-coms that can get a heart all warm and cozy. Obviously inspired by the same premise, Read Between the Lines is a modern-day, WLW spin. The enemies-to-lovers, opposites-attract fills you with hope as you wait for all the pieces to click into place. Once they do, the romance feels easy, natural...but realistic in the sense that so many problems are ignored in exchange for that bliss. For a moment, Rosie and Jane exist in a comforting, sweet bubble, but as in real life, you can't ignore reality forever.

🦇 I adored Lacey's Stars Collide (and I'm eagerly trying to get my hands on her upcoming release Cover Story), but it's obvious this was one of Lacey's first lesbian romances. So much of the chemistry between Rosie and Jane was built off-screen, through the texts they exchanged long before the story started. Unfortunately, that makes it seem like there's not a great deal of chemistry between Rosie and Jane once their true identities are revealed.

🦇The source of conflict feels a bit exhausting. Rosie remains hung up about the fact that Jane's family's company is the reason she's losing her bookstore, but Jane herself isn't the reason. Rosie struggles to disassociate losing her bookstore from Jane the entire time. Deciding to leave the family business, while a point of character development for Jane, shouldn't have been a solution solely for Rosie's benefit. None of the problems (internal and external) either woman faced built enough tension to give the story momentum.

🦇 The smut scenes are...not great. Some of the word choice is repetitive ("swirled and plunged" included, which is just...please don't), and there's more of a focus on logistics over emotion. Fade to black paired with a little post-coital pillow talk would have worked just as well (and perhaps felt less rushed, distance, and awkward). Again, it feels like this was Lacey's first WLW romance, in which case, you can see the growth in later novels. 

🦇 Recommended for fans of You've Got Mail, Cleat Cute, and Fly With Me.

Jazelle H

🦇 Read Between the Lines Book Review 🦇

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

❝ Her online crush, her real-life crush, and the woman who’d crushed her dreams were all the same person, and her mind was still struggling to snap all the pieces into place. ❞

❓ #QOTD What's your favorite 90s romcom? ❓

 

🦇 Books have always been a part of Rosie Taft's life. That happens when your late mother once owned a Manhattan bookstore you've now inherited. The only thing missing from Rosie's life: a romance to rival the ones she reads about. Though she has a flirty online friendship with lesbian romance author "Brie," they've never met; never turned those flirtatious remarks into deep, romantic gazes in reality. Jane Breslin works for her father's property development business by day, but by night, she lets her hair down and steamy side out as a romance writer. When the business terminates Rosie's bookstore lease, their world's collide and online identities are revealed. Can Jane pen her way back into Rosie's heart for a happy ending?

💜 By some coincidence, I watched You've Got Mail for the first time a few months ago. There's something about the sweet simplicity of 90s rom-coms that can get a heart all warm and cozy. Obviously inspired by the same premise, Read Between the Lines is a modern-day, WLW spin. The enemies-to-lovers, opposites-attract fills you with hope as you wait for all the pieces to click into place. Once they do, the romance feels easy, natural...but realistic in the sense that so many problems are ignored in exchange for that bliss. For a moment, Rosie and Jane exist in a comforting, sweet bubble, but as in real life, you can't ignore reality forever.

🦇 I adored Lacey's Stars Collide (and I'm eagerly trying to get my hands on her upcoming release Cover Story), but it's obvious this was one of Lacey's first lesbian romances. So much of the chemistry between Rosie and Jane was built off-screen, through the texts they exchanged long before the story started. Unfortunately, that makes it seem like there's not a great deal of chemistry between Rosie and Jane once their true identities are revealed.

🦇The source of conflict feels a bit exhausting. Rosie remains hung up about the fact that Jane's family's company is the reason she's losing her bookstore, but Jane herself isn't the reason. Rosie struggles to disassociate losing her bookstore from Jane the entire time. Deciding to leave the family business, while a point of character development for Jane, shouldn't have been a solution solely for Rosie's benefit. None of the problems (internal and external) either woman faced built enough tension to give the story momentum.

🦇 The smut scenes are...not great. Some of the word choice is repetitive ("swirled and plunged" included, which is just...please don't), and there's more of a focus on logistics over emotion. Fade to black paired with a little post-coital pillow talk would have worked just as well (and perhaps felt less rushed, distance, and awkward). Again, it feels like this was Lacey's first WLW romance, in which case, you can see the growth in later novels. 

🦇 Recommended for fans of You've Got Mail, Cleat Cute, and Fly With Me.

✨ The Vibes ✨

🩷 Enemies to Lovers

🩷 Sapphic Romance

🩷 Books About Books

🩷 Lesbian MCs

🩷 Contemporary Queer Romance

🩷 Book 1 in a Series

🩷 Opposites Attract

I didn't expect to like it so much, I totally fell in love with the characters and the introvert-extrovert dynamic between the protagonists? Totally ate that up.

Katheryn

Wonderful!!

I loved this book. It's a quick read, very sappy, very lovey, and so full of warm good feelings. I'll never get over gay stories, seeing myself reflected in characters on the page. Rosie and Jane are incredible together and their love story is perfect.

Jess Griffin

this was cute and i did enjoy it but it just felt quite slow in places

Sav Kay

The way I was gonna give this 4 stars because the plot wasn’t ✨wow✨ but then I remembered the non fade to black sexc scenes and how much I love that 😌

Jamie Trenholm

Loved the idea did not love the execution. I didn’t 100% believe in the romance

Naty Corbett

I rather enjoyed this book. It's been a hot minute since I last read a purely romance novel as opposed to a book of another genre that happened to have some romance in it. I really enjoyed how the author broke the 4th wall, so to speak, on a number of occasions calling out those who look down on ramance novels as belonging to a lesser genre. While reading this I liked to imagine that it was semi-autobiographical or perhaps wishful thinking on the part of the author, writing her ideal romance while filling the pages with the hardships and criticisms she's received as an author who writes romance novels. 
I found much of the main cast to be pretty well fleshed out and well written, however, the character Shanice felt like an afterthought, the token Black friend to a T. She is introduced partway through, has very little dialogue or any influence on the plot and is specifically called out by the author as Black whereas I don't recall any of the other character's skin colour being referenced.

KADY BURNS

While reading this I was compelled to keep going until about the 80 percent mark and then it kinda just fell apart and sped up.

Ellie Mas


I really loved the plot, is a great story. Particularly, the way is based on family matters, issues that we all go through daily. 

Felt for the characters, I could easily relate with one of them, which made me feel like it had my biggest dream come true, the one on my bucket list. Maybe someday I guess. 

Sorry but I struggle with one of the character's voices, I suppose is a matter of feeling, I just did not like it. 

However, I recommend listening to this one, although I may also try reading it to get a better perception of this one character.

Jude Silberfeld

As happens every so often, I found myself liking Read Between the Lines more at the end than at the beginning.

What the book is about: Rosie inherited her mother’s bookstore, Between the Pages, and couldn’t be happier about her job. She’s a huge book nerd and loves nothing more than recommending the right book to the right person. When she’s not working, she chats, via Twitter DMs, with Brie, her favourite lesfic author. Rosie might even have a crush on Brie… They talk about everything, except their real identities. When Rosie gets a letter from Jane Breslin, property manager at Breslin Property Development, letting her know the bookstore’s lease won’t be renewed, all she tells Brie is that she had a rough day. She doesn’t tell her either about the hot suit-wearing woman who came into the store with her adorable niece. Little does she know that both Brie and the sexy aunt are actually Jane Breslin…

For the first time since I started reading Rachel Lacey’s books, it took me a pretty long time to really feel invested in the story. Maybe because this was marketed as a You’ve Got Mail inspired enemies-to-lovers romance, and I’m not a fan of the movie (I do love Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner, however). I liked both MCs but I didn’t feel the chemistry and while I wasn’t bored, I wasn’t captivated either. Once Jane and Rosie realise who the other is, however, the chemistry is much more obvious, and I really felt the connection.

Read Between the Lines starts indeed as an enemies-to-lovers romance, but it’s mostly opposites attract, with Jane being an introvert and Rosie an extrovert. Jane is sweet but awkward and Rosie is always trying to find the bright side of events. She’s an optimist and a go-getter, and even when she’s scared of losing her beloved bookstore, she keeps looking for ways to beat the odds. Her best friend Lia is wonderfully supportive, as are her other roommates and friends. Jane doesn’t have friends but she can always count on her sister to cheer her on, even against their parents’ will.

I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, and until that happened, I couldn’t let myself fully enjoy the romance. This feeling of dread wouldn’t leave me. I was actually relieved when it happened because it made sense and also it didn’t, which is kinda what life is about, making do with things that don’t make sense. And the characters could finally work on fixing things. Whether they’d succeed or not was never a real question, since romance demands a HEA or HFN, but how they would, and whether I’d believe it, was.

Rosie and Jane are meant to be together, and them being apart could only last a little while. Their love is too strong and too real, and they’ve addressed their issues from the beginning. They didn’t fix them from the beginning, however (hence the sense of dread), which wouldn’t have been plausible anyway. The ending could have felt rushed but because of what made me uneasy before, it didn’t. I’d been worried as I was reading, that I wasn’t enjoying the story as much as I had hoped. But in the end, it worked. Everything that kept me on my toes, even as it all felt very mellow, led to this ending. I closed this book with a really good feeling.

I received a copy from the publisher and I am voluntarily leaving a review.

Neva Davies

An amazing addition to lgbt romance

Read Between the Lines by Rachel Lacey is such an amazing sapphic romance, and one that I am going to recommend to everyone who reads and loves romance. The story is sweet, with two characters who clearly have chemistry and are meant for each other. I was reminded while reading Read Between the Lines why I love books with characters who are romance authors and who get their own happy ending!

Bunnhi &
Read Between the Lines by Rachel Lacey

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