A Love Letter To Whiskey

A Love Letter to Whiskey

Author: Kandi Steiner
Pages: 378
Genre(s): Contemporary Adult Romance

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Goodreads synopsis can be found here
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My Rating: 🩷🩷
Format: Kindle
Recommended: No

My thoughts ✨spoilers✨:

I always feel a bit unsure when I begin reading any book that has a high average rating especially if it’s a romance novel and this sits pretty at a 4.21 out of 5 on Goodreads. Don’t get me wrong, I have zero hate in my heart for the genre, but it’s been difficult for me to find a love story that truly resonates. A lot of the reading community has been hyping this up for so long that I was starting to seriously wonder if I was missing out on something amazing. Turns out that wasn’t exactly the case and here’s where things went right and also very wrong.

The story revolves around “B” and Jamie’s dysfunctional friendship / relationship. They meet in high school where Jamie ends up falling for and dating B’s bestie, Jenna, but yet (and this is probably the most unbelievable aspect of all) has an extreme attachment to B and keeps her within his orbit for as long as humanly possible. Now, if that hasn’t made you roll your eyes and scoff then please just wait for it because it gets worse better. We learn quickly that the only redeeming qualities Jamie possesses are as follows:

1. He’s hot and apparently smells like a bar reminds B of whiskey
2. He’s rich (sort of??) and knows how to surf.
3. He has immense patience and can wait in the shadows for 3 years while someone intentionally ignores him.. no that’s not alarming behavior so dreamy

For some unknown reason, B and Jamie chase each other for 11 whole years while never taking the next obvious step in their shared lives together, preferring instead to cheat on every respective partner they have with – you guessed it – each other. These are facts you cannot argue as these two characters never had a real reason as to why they weren’t exclusive. No conflict kept them apart aside from the random temper tantrums which would lead to long bouts of playing phone tag. At one point I audibly laughed out loud at Jamie’s audacity to be upset that he was cheated on because he was a dirtbag cheating at the same time.

I understand angst-y situations pretty well as I was once a teenager many moons ago, but this went from relatable to ridiculous at warp speed. I want to be able to root for the love interests in the story, but I simply couldn’t. In the end, I was just happy that they weren’t available to hurt anyone else in their toxic web.

Overall, the writing was very good which makes this not-so-stellar review difficult to write and I will be reading more of Kandi Steiner’s work because I have a feeling a 5 star book is just waiting to be found.