He looked untouchable. Unattainable. The kind of man your mama warned you about, but the kind you’d willingly crawl on your hands and knees for anyway.

madison is one of the strongest characters i’ve ever read. she managed to raise, jamie, a young boy with such a passion heart, while also balancing multiple jobs to make sure her son can live comfortably. i just want to give her a big hug, she doesn’t deserve any of the things she had to go through. this is the first lilian t james book ive ever read, and i have to say i’m absolutely HOOKED. this book was amazing, & i loved every single second of it. What I hated... The love interest, Maddison it's a woman that has had two men in her life when we meet her: the first one got her pregnant and ran away, the second one was abusive. for the general plotline] Single mom who has an abusive ex and falls in love with her neighbor that’s an ex military man who’s much older than her, lost his dad when he was young and had very similar ex gf/wife situations. To conclude, this has many similar elements to many many books I've read (lover of tropes here) but the execution was not it. It seems it's a well loved book to some, so don't let my review keep you from trying it, it's currently enrolled in #KU, by the way.

tries to knit baby blankets for you to donate to the local women’s shelter you help out at because you’ve been struggling to find the time to make them yourself. Ummm... this is actually complicated for me to rate, because I loved it and hated it at the same time. while the single mum trope usually has a sexy guy coming into her life who adores the shit out of her kid(s) and sweeps her off her feet. there is zero contest for me. I thought this book had a really good premise and these types of romances about overcoming past toxic relationships are something that I completely love, however, it all started wrong when I started hating the main character in the first 10% of the book because of this: but my main (maybe only?) complaint is that this kinda had a Mariana Zapata-style ending. you don’t get to see them much as an actual couple when they finally make it official and i wanted more :( i was definitely a little unsatisfied and it solidified my rating of a solid four stars rather than five. sometimes with a slowburn, you just want a little bit more out of the ending, you know? since you’ve waited so long for them to be together.

Madison and Garret are new next-door neighbours in a duplex, and I loved how the beginning of the book there’s a graphic of what their two mirror-image apartments look like.

the scene where Jamie told Madison wanted to play football actually broke me, wtf. Madison’s pain and exhaustion was filtered so effortlessly into the narrative that you didn’t notice it often. it wasn’t until the smallest thing happened that was painfully fierce enough to shatter her facade. And then, this guy became the love interest because he's hot, so why not? I thought I was going to like him after putting her in her place, but oh my god. Sadly, I got so tired of the book that I stopped highlighting the toxic behavior and all the possessiveness. The author tried to make him all mysterious and a little grumpy, but he was just an asshole and didn't show personality throughout the entire book, he was just there. He also made some terrible assumptions about the protagonist at the beginning, about her being a gold digger (when she's far from it, working like three jobs and being a single mom) and never apologized for that.