Title: For You & no One Else (Say Everything #3)
Author: Roni Loren
Date of publication: 5 July 2022
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Author's links:
My rating: 4 Stars
Blurb
She has the perfect life…and it’s a perfect lie.
Behind the careful façade, she’s struggling:
To feel like she fits in. To find her true voice.
Now, finally, she’s ready to start living her own story.
Eliza Catalano has the perfect life. So what if it actually looks nothing like the story she tells online? As a therapist, it’s part of her job to look like she has all the answers, right? But when Eliza ends up as a viral “Worst Date Ever” meme, everything in her Instagram-filtered world begins to crumble.
Enter the most obnoxiously attractive man she's ever met, and a bet she can't resist: if she swears off social media for six months, Beck Carter’ll teach her the wonders of surviving the "real world." No technology, no dating apps, no pretty filters, no BS.
It seems like the perfect deal—she can lay low until her sudden infamy passes, meet some interesting new people, and maybe even curate this experience into a how I quit the online dating racket book along the way. But something about Beck’s raw honesty speaks to Eliza in ways she never expected. She knows he’s supposed to be completely hands-off…but as complex feelings grow and walls come tumbling down, rough-around-the-edges Beck may be exactly what Eliza needs to finally, truly face herself—and decide who she really wants to be.
Review
This is the final book in the current series of moving and emotional contemporary romances that are not afraid to tackle heavy subjects. This is how I discovered Roni Loren, my first book of hers was The One You Fight For from her series The Ones Who Got Away who focuses on lives of school shooting surviours finding HEA year later.
This current series though lighter in tone, also explores serious issues - mental health, disability, depression and suicidal ideation, childhood and adult trauma.
I appreciate how the author treat her characters with care and empathy and doesn't exploit their issues for sensational value only. Mind you, I am speaking from an outsider's perspective here and can't say how ownvoices readers would feel about these series. I would definitely recommend checking more reviews and especially CWs before picking any of the books.
This one, I can say, is my favourite in the series. It is a romance featuring an older heroine and a younger hero who try a friends-with-benefits relationship while she is searching offline for Mr. Right.
I liked Eliza a lot. I can't comment of how realistic her representation as a therapist but I found her relatable in her personal life - an intense sense of loneliness after the loss of her parents, longing for a long-term partner, following a specific plan in life both personal and professional.
I found the element of performance on social media and in real life relationship very interesting. She kept putting a happy face online and on dates with the goal to impress, to win people over up to the point that she forgot who she was and what made her happy.
The social media and our presence on it is becoming very noticeably present in contemporary romance but sometimes I feel it overtakes the plot. This was not the case here, mostly because she took a SM break after a non-consented video of her was leaked and went viral going viral for all the wrong reasons. And because the other MC, Beck, was very much anti-SM. The NoPho parties he took her to were interesting and certainly unconventional but they struck me as a bit juvenile. While I liked Beckham a lot, he remained a mystery till the end. He came off as confident and very much in control of his life. He appeared sure of his priorities and life goals. Until he wasn't any more. It was his relationship with Eliza that was eye-opening for him.
There is a third act break up and both parties were to blame for it. They each violated the other person's trust in a way that is hard to forgive. Still I found the groveling and forgiveness scenes convincing and could see Eliza and Beck being together, trying a relationship.
Something that I liked in the series as a whole is the great friendships. Eliza had her friends by her side at all times, talking with them helped her reconsider what happily ever after could be for her and disentangle her own happiness from what society tells you happiness should look like.
It's the epilogue that is my main issue with the story. It was so over the top, a nice wrap up to the whole series but really unnecessary here. It was too conventional for the MCs, like after all the talk about different forms of HEA, they just got the most traditional one. Yes, it took a while and they worked hard for their HEA - he got the counseling he needed and she wrote the book she wanted to write but still it undermined the whole point the story was trying to make about the possibility of alternative HEA.
With this minor complaint in mind, I still would recommend the series if you are looing for contemporary romances with complicated characters finding love where least expected. These are rich, well built stories that don't shy away from heavy themes but ultimately leave us with hope and optimism for the future.
CW: religious cult, addiction (in the past), loss of parents in car accident (in the past), embarrassing video leaked out
