I have adored everything I have read by Kristina Forest. So when I saw this adult romance debut, I knew I had to read it. And I adored every page of The Neighbor Favor. It’s like me in a book! Keep reading this book review for my thoughts.
Summary
Shy, bookish, and admittedly awkward, Lily Greene has always felt inadequate compared to the rest of her accomplished family, who strive for Black excellence. She dreams of becoming an editor of children’s books but has been frustratingly stuck in the nonfiction division for years without a promotion in sight. Lily finds escapism in her correspondences with her favorite fantasy author, and what begins as two lonely people connecting over e-mail turns into a tentative friendship and possibly something else Lily won’t let herself entertain–until he ghosts her.
Months later, still crushed but determined to take charge of her life, Lily seeks a date to her sister’s wedding. And the perfect person to help her is Nick Brown, her charming, attractive new neighbor, whom she feels drawn to for unexplainable reasons. Little does she know that Nick is an author–her favorite fantasy author.
Nick, who has his reasons for using a pen name and for pushing people away, soon realizes that the beautiful, quiet woman from down the hall is the same Lily he fell in love with over e-mail months ago. Unwilling to complicate things even more between them, he agrees to set her up with someone else, though this simple favor between two neighbors is anything but–not when he can’t get her off his mind.
Review
(Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher. This has not impacted my review which is unbiased and honest.)
I adored the premise of The Neighbor Favor before I even started. We all would love to be able to tell our favorite author we loved their books. To tell them truly how much they meant to us. And for Lily, not only does she do that, but in their email exchanges they begin to open up to each other. I’m a huge fan of letters in books and the email exchanges in The Neighbor Favor swept me off my feet. We witness Nick and Lily not only getting to know each other, but also having realizations of their own. By this point in the book, I was smitten.
We can infuse so much personality, narration, into our emails. There’s a sense of using emails as a journal entry, as places to pour late night thoughts. And then there’s the added benefit of someone you might not even know responding back to us, sharing that same intimacy. Can you tell I had and was an e-mail penpal before? But where The Neighbor Favor picks up even more steam is after the emails. In the ghosting. When we feel like maybe we didn’t actually have that connection, or something went wrong. All the maybes that lie in the dust.
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And that’s where The Neighbor Favor ends up hooking you. Because throughout this process, we’re able to witness the true character exploration of both Nick and Lily. How Nick is just convinced nothing good will happen to him, that he can’t hold on to something good. Or how Lily needs to stand up for herself, to take her belief in herself and actualize it. These struggles which feel so universal and combined with their chemistry, The Neighbor Favor is a book that I already would re-read. Find The Neighbor Favor on Goodreads, Storygraph, Amazon, Indiebound, Bookshop.org, & The Book Depository.