AUTHOR: Clare Ashton GENRE: LGBTQ+ Romance PAGES: 421 pages RELEASED: 1 March 2023 SERIES: Oxford Romance #1 SYNOPSIS: Oxford – celebrated city of dreaming spires and class warfare – is an ambition come true for lesbian, geeky, upper-middle-class Charlotte and straight, charismatic, working-class Millie. Against the odds, theirs is an instant, best friendship. Forever. Exuberant Millie is a breath of fresh air for polite Charlotte and a force of nature within the university's hallowed walls. And they are going to be the best lawyers of their year and change the world. But their world changes instead when things go queerly sideways, and they haven’t seen each other since. Ten years on and Charlotte returns to where it all began. She has a new job at a prestigious law firm and Oxford is as beautiful as ever. She’s a safe distance from her overbearing barrister mother Nicola and three office floors from her snappy college mentor, Olivia. Then Millie bounds around the corner wanting to be friends again and it's as if the last decade never happened. Will it be different the second time around? Can they be friends again? Or will love and attraction change things? A sweet Sapphic friends-to -overs romance set in picturesque Oxford.
Millie and Charlotte became best friends while living in the same dorm and both undertaking a law degree. But now ten years later, the pair haven’t crossed paths since their final year at Oxford, their friendship having been left in tatters afters Charlotte fell in love with her best friend. Now they’re both back in the city and the familiar tug of their friendship has them reconnecting. A lot has happened in ten years, but nothing has changed about how easy their friendship is, and both realise just how much they’ve missed that connection over the past decade. As they catch up on everything they’ve missed since they last saw each other, old and new feelings are surfacing, threatening the friendship they’ve only just started reforging… Gosh this was a super sweet sapphic romance with a nice serving of slow-burn! I do love me a friend-to-lovers romance, and I enjoyed the added twist of the pair having to actually rekindle their friendship before romance was even on the cards. It was interesting following Millie and Charlotte’s friendship through both flashbacks to their time in college, as well as current day. I definitely did not want to say goodbye to these two come the final page and would have loved to follow their story for longer. Both Charlotte and Millie were interesting characters, and their separate back-stories were explored fairly well throughout the book. Clare gave a good focus on the exploration of identity, especially in terms of sexuality and coming-out, as well as trying to forge your own path in life, both through Charlotte during college and Millie during current-day. All of this complimented their developing friendship and romance as their stories intertwined. The only downside was that the flashbacks used, while fun, only offered a very small glimpse at their friendship in college, and therefore we didn’t really get to see much of how Charlotte fell in love with Millie the first time round. The same also goes for setting up how Millie saw Charlotte during this time, which impacted the realisation that she was in love with Charlotte in current day, and that that love and attraction was rooted in college. The actual current-day romance was a little rushed at the end compared to the rest of the book - it had all the fun of a slow-burn but was wrapped up way too quickly to really feel satisfied. A little trigger warning for conversations surrounding miscarriage. This was a really emotional part of the book that I wasn’t entirely anticipating, although it was clear early on that Millie had some sort of a story regarding fertility/children. As this is the first book in a companion novel series, I’m interested to see who’s love story Clare delivers next, and if we get to see Millie and Charlotte pop up again. Either way, I’m excited for another visit to Oxford! If you’re searching for your next sweet sapphic slow-burn, look no further than this swoony romp in Oxford! |
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