Marcela Ortiz has had a crush on Ben Young for well over eight years (!!) and, in My Best Friend’s Wedding style, Ben has become engaged to another woman, Alice. Spirited librarian Marcela is expected to attend the wedding in spite of her secretly broken heart, and that means being a part of all of the pre-wedding festivities. She finds herself distracted from her heartbreak by Ben’s older brother, Theo. A former NFL player looking for a new life beyond the field, he, too, has a secret crush… on Ben’s fiancée, Alice, his own long-term friend. Marcela is horrified when Theo tries to confess at the engagement dinner that he’s in love with his brother’s bride-to-be. She grabs him and steers him to her room so he can sleep off his drunken impulse. The only problem is that when they emerge in the morning, their friends and family think they’ve hooked up.

Marcela and Theo shrug it off. Hey, they’re lonely and they both need a date for the wedding, so maybe if they fake a relationship for long enough they’ll have a good cover for their feelings for the bride and groom. Fake dating after a fake drunken hook-up, though, leads to a real drunken hook- up. Surely they can keep things purely physical? And if they can’t, can they let go of Ben and Alice and find real love with each other?

I had a few problems with The Next Best Fling. At least one of them is due to the fact the heroine is crushing on a guy who refuses to acknowledge her worth and has not done so for a good eight years. And while it’s good that Theo and Marcela know their crushes aren’t healthy and are in fact holding them back from getting where and what they really want out of life, it also takes them both forever to disengage from Ben and Alice. The burn is a slow one as they waddle through their denial toward real love, and for some readers it’s going to take way too long for them to get to that point.

I liked Marcella and her absolute true love of being a librarian; the plus-size rep here is also stellar, and I liked that Theo has a sweetness to him on top of it all. The romance builds realistically and I wanted Marcella and Theo to wake up and get it together already.

What isn’t realistic is what happens with Ben, the plot twisting him until…well, you’ll see.

The Next Best Fling is a big, messy romantic drama. The central romance is sweet, the hero and heroine lovable, but too much focus is pulled from it by the crushes they have on others to make it fully credible. I definitely enjoyed it, but I can’t quite give it a wholehearted recommendation.