Forget Me Not by Julie Soto
In this tender and steamy story we follow Ama Torres, a wedding planner on the rise who has been hired by Hazel Renee, a celebrity makeup influencer to plan her wedding to her girlfriend Jackie. The only hitch is that Ama must work with Elliot Bloom, a hot, broody florist who is a family friend of the couple and also happens to be her ex that she broke up with two years earlier.
This is a lovely second chance romance, told in a dual point of view, alternating between past and present with Elliot’s POV told in the past when they meet until they break up and Ama’s POV in the present, leading up to the big wedding. I was up late into the night reading this wanting to find out what happened!
Ama is twenty six and started her own business after she left her job with the biggest wedding planner in Sacramento. She was excited when Hazel and Jackie approached her to do their wedding after Jackie’s boss recommended her. They want a big creative wedding that will make a splash. The wedding planning part of this book is great fun. I loved reading about the descriptions of the decorations, especially the flowers. When Ama and Elliot work together, their designs are magical, and they create epic décor like a dance floor with flowers and lights. Ama is named after a flower, which is a little mystery in the story so I won’t reveal it, but Elliot hasn’t been able to have them in his shop since they broke up because they remind him of her.
Elliot went to school for architecture but took over the flower shop, Blooms, when his father got sick and passed away. He builds beautiful structures with flowers. He makes special boutonnieres for clients when they come in to meet with him and it’s really sweet when he makes one for Ama using flowers as his love language. He is quiet and has six tattoos of rare flowers that Ama is obsessed with and really wants to see. Things get spicy on the counter of the flower shop with dirt and flowers everywhere and I may never look at bouquets again in the same way! Elliot is protective of Ama and looks out for her and I love that he’s there for her when she needs him. He gets concerned when he sees she is still driving a disaster of a car with a nail in the tire and all of the dashboard lights flashing. He is a man of few words but when he speaks, he gets to the point and people listen and respect him.
Ama loves weddings but is strongly opposed to marriage. Her mother has been married sixteen times! In fact, Ama is one of the biggest commitment-phobes I’ve ever seen. She believes in love and weddings for others, though. When she comes into Elliot’s life, she is a whirlwind of wonderful chaos. and even has a grumpy cat! If I sound like a fan girl, well yes I am! And speaking of fangirls, the author spoke in an interview about how she wrote fanfiction before this and was inspired by Kylo Ren from Star Wars for Elliot.
There are other wonderful characters in the story like Ama’s step brothers and sisters that she hires as assistants, especially Mar, a brilliant and gorgeous photographer and loyal friend. Ama also loves donuts and brings them to all of her meetings with couples and vendors and thinks the perfect donut can solve most problems. I got hungry reading about them.
As it gets closer to Hazel and Jackie’s big wedding, Hazel tells Ama and Elliot that TLC has approached her about including their wedding on their show, Fabulous Dream Weddings, and the film crew will be there to get video of the wedding which will now be seen by millions of people. While this is a great opportunity for Ama and Elliot to showcase their businesses, it adds extra pressure and some chaos to their final preparations. This is quick paced and not too long and I would have gladly read more.
I’m happy to highly recommend this book to readers who love a steamy romance. This one with a fun wedding planner and grumpy but loveable florist who get a second chance at love is a winner!
Recent Comments
I seem to recall another recent CR – by Ali Hazelwood? – with a hero inspired by Adam Driver. A popular choice, it seems.
You are probably thinking of The Love Hypothesis and the MC is even named Adam. I haven’t read it yet. There are two more book reviews I’m working on that are also Kylo Ren inspired!
Although I’ve noticed that $10.99 is now the price point for better-known authors and highly-anticipated romances, I just can’t bring myself to pay it. So FORGET ME NOT is going onto my tbr with the acronym PDL (waiting for price drop or library copy).
Wow. It’s 99p in the UK on Kindle. I wonder why the massive price difference?
Just a little history:
When the Kindle entered the marketplace in 2007, Amazon had a simple sales pitch: Anyone with a Kindle could buy all the ebooks they wanted through the online marketplace, and many of those ebooks — in fact, all New York Times best-sellers — would cost no more than $9.99.
$9.99 is a steal for a new book. At the time, most hardcovers were averaging a list price of about $26, and many cost more. But for Amazon, this price point was an apparent no-brainer. The first generation Kindle was expensive, and value conscious customers needed some incentive to buy into it. Why would anyone spend $399 on an e-reader if they couldn’t expect to make up at least part of the cost in a discount on ebooks?
And while this point is often glossed over, Amazon was actually following a precedent set by publishers in its pricing model. In her opinion for US v. Apple, Judge Denise Cote noted that before 2009, most publishers discounted ebooks by 20 percent from the price of a hardcover, which often led to a suggested list price of around $9.99.
But by 2009, publishers had changed their minds. Now they considered the idea of $9.99 ebooks to be an existential threat. Printing and binding and shipping — the costs that ebooks eliminated — accounted for only two dollars of the cost of a hardcover, publishers argued. So the ebook for a $20 hardcover book should cost no less than $18. And according to publishers, by setting the price of an ebook at $9.99, Amazon was training readers to undervalue books.
“The big concern — and it’s a massive concern — is the $9.99 pricing point,” David Young, the CEO of Hachette Book Group USA, told the New Yorker in 2010. “If it’s allowed to take hold in the consumer’s mind that a book is worth ten bucks, to my mind it’s game over for this business.”
So, in 2009, the idea that a new ebook would cost $10 was a travesty. Publishers thought it would be way too low.
That’s interesting—although I have to call gaslighting on the assertion that the manufacture & distribution of a physical book accounts for only $2 of its list price; sounds a bit like “Hollywood accounting” to me. On the other hand, perhaps in the seven years or so since I got my first e-reader I’ve been “spoiled” by the plethora of romances that regularly cost $5.99 or less (not to mention the freebies, 99-cent deals, other discounted sales, and books available through KU—which, even at $11 a month, easily pays for itself within a the first week of the new month for me), so my mind is balking at paying $10.99 (around $12 with sales tax, which is charged in my state) for an electronic file of a book by a new-to-me author. We all have to make our book budgets work for ourselves, and if I’m regularly being called upon to pay $12 for an ebook, said budget with be obliterated within a week. But I’m sadly realizing this is becoming the new normal: I’m already bracing myself because I saw that Rachel (HEATED RIVALRY) Reid’s upcoming release, TIME TO SHINE, will be $9.99, and considering how much I loved her Game Changers series, I’m grudgingly going to pay the full price.
Paying over $6.99 for an electronic file would bother me less if we were genuinely buying them, but the fact that technically, we’re only gaining a long term lease makes it much worse to me.
Yes—there’s that aspect too. You don’t actually “own” the book, you just buy access to the file. The publisher can yank the file at any time, change the cover, edit the contents, or just “disappear” the book altogether. I’ve considered buying print versions of my keeper-shelf favorites so that I’ll always have the book as I remember it—but there goes even more of the limited book budget. Sigh.
This is a super interesting issue and one I think will be ultimately settled in the courts.
You DO own DRM free books you buy at least that is the current legal standard.
One piece of this problem is how much publishers are limiting library copies of books. In the world that I grew up in, very few owned anything like number of books that I do. (I realize owned is a misnomer here.) I used to go to the library every two weeks and check out ten books. Now, I can keep–again a legal misnomer–the books I read.
I do feel strongly we should, as a culture, pay for books. But that doesn’t mean the best way to do that is to pay big bucks on our own. In my view, we should have a system where we communally own books through our libraries and where their ebook copies are plentiful and easy to check out to our e-readers.
What are you—a communist??
(Actual words I’ve had thrown at me for wanting to support our local libraries/librarians. It’s a dark world we live in.)
Ha. I live in the far left. No one ever accuses me of being too liberal!
I just saw this is on sale for $4.99 (Kindle edition) until 8/20.
On my TBR!
I think you’ll enjoy it!