Ten Trends to Seduce Your Bestfriend by Penny Reid

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Title: Ten Trends to Seduce Your Bestfriend
Author: Penny Reid
Published by: Indie
Release Date: April 12, 2022
Format: Kobo Book
Pages: 553
Genres: Contemporary, Romance
Potential Triggers: View Spoiler »sexual harassment by a "friend", mental/emotional abuse in past « Hide Spoiler
Reading Challenges: Lenoreo's 2022 Diversity Reading Challenge
Find it: Goodreads ✩ Amazon ✩ B&N ✩ Google ✩ Kobo ✩ iBooks ✩ IndieBound ✩ Book Depository
My rating:

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.

My Review:

4 stars — This book was equal parts 5++++ stars and 3 stars.  So I averaged at 4 (though sometimes I think it’s more 4.5 rounded down).

I found myself skimming ahead at some of the parts where I was sure misunderstandings were abounding (though ironically it wasn’t what I thought in one particular instance), cause I needed to see when things would be resolved, or what was coming next.  So there were parts of this book that made me anxious, and I needed for them to have flowed much more quickly than they did.  Sometimes I skim ahead because I’m excited about what’s going to happen (and I love those times).  But this was more me needing reassurance.  And my skimming didn’t help because the conflicts were drawn out.  Does that make sense?  I fully accept that I’m a weirdo, but it is what it is.

I actually got Byron more than Winnie in the end…which is funny, b/c I thought Byron was going to be just another one of those jerks that people are a bit too accommodating towards.  Kind of ironic since that was a central theme to his growth story, and something he was striving to balance in his life.  There were moments where he reminded me of people in my life, and how they are so misunderstood and hated upon for being different.  It definitely hurt my heart.  It’s amazing how so many people in this world won’t give different people a chance, won’t allow them to *be* different.  How they feel like a burden.  Wow, apparently I really needed to get that off my chest.

So yeah, while Byron was taciturn, grumpy, abrupt, that all came from a specific place in his neurodivergent brain, and I appreciated that we got to see how he was affected by the way other people were intolerant of his differences/needs/etc.

Winnie…Winnie is this seemingly normal nerdy girl, but I feel like she was much more damaged.  I wish, in the end, that she had sought help for her childhood traumas, because they affected her in such a profound way.  We would see Byron working to improve himself, but if Winnie did so, it happened off page.  She frustrated me to a strong degree, but I think she was supposed to.  I think the thing that was interesting about Winnie is that to the outside world, she was a very normal human being.  She bottled up her issues (like so many of us do), and so you would never know how fundamentally flawed she was in the way she saw people.  I really appreciated that we did get to see her moment of clarity, that it came from Amelia as well as Byron, and that you could tell she was going to try to improve.

I did love the chemistry between Winnie and Byron…it’s a little outside what I personally experience, but I got it from their perspective.  I loved seeing their involuntary feels for one another, their attraction, and wow…for a book that basically had fairly minimal steamy scenes, the steam was still freaking hot.  But I’m one of those readers that can be satisfied by chemistry even if I don’t see the full shebang.  And holy cow, there were a ton of humourous moments in the steamy scenes too — humour that translated into real moments of anxiety, which is a weird thing to say, but I guess I just liked how real it got with some of that.  Sometimes I get tired of not seeing more variety in thoughts/feelings during intimate moments.  I know I’m not making any sense, but when you get to those parts, maybe you’ll understand.

I loved the STEM aspects of this story.  I’ve never been much of that kind of nerd, but I definitely was the smart kid in school.  There were so many little moments where, even if they didn’t fit me specifically, I could make myself fit in pieces of the story.  I loved how Winnie was trying to smash (as in smash the patriarchy) all these things that society has told us about STEM, about girls in STEM, about what is worthy of “smart” people to be interested in.  And that it’s all fucking bullshit, and EVERYONE, but especially young girls, should be free to pursue all the things that interest them — girly, nerdy, everything in between.  It was very uplifting in that way.

I think where this book fails to be a wow book for me is in the pacing and length.  There were quite a few predictable conflicts that I kinda wish had gone in different ways…but at the same time, they made sense for Winnie and Byron.  I think I just would have enjoyed the book EVEN MORE if it had been about 20% shorter.  I didn’t feel like every part added to the whole of the story.  I feel like Jeff’s entire part either needed to be shortened, or it needed to be dealt with more fully in the end.  For me it felt like Jeff was very much like Byron’s father, and I wish Byron had figured that out.  I don’t know…he was truly a fucking dick, and I’m not sure the purpose of that with the way the book stands.

So yeah.  So many parts of this book absolutely delighted me, I just needed faster pacing for me it to be a 5 star-er.