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Just Friends

The must-read emotional and enthralling second chance romance from TikTok star Haley Pham

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Just Friends

By: Haley Pham
Narrated by: Sura Siu
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About this listen

 This heart warming and swoon worthy second chance romance about childhood friends reconnecting as adults is the highly anticipated debut novel from BookTok icon Haley Pham.

Blair and Declan were inseparable growing up – best friends who knew each other better than anyone else. But when an impulsive kiss took them from friends to something more, everything changed. Just as quickly as their romance started, one moment shattered it all, leaving them with nothing but heartbreak and silence.

Four years later, Blair is back in their coastal hometown of Seabrook to support her mom and care for her great-aunt Lottie. To make ends meet, Blair applies to work at a coffee shop – only to discover it’s managed by none other than Declan. The boy she loved. The boy she lost. The boy who still makes her heart race.

As Blair’s path keeps crossing with Declan’s, old wounds resurface, secrets are revealed and sparks reignite. But could their future ever be free of their past?

Told in dual timelines that unravel the magic and pain of first love, Just Friends is a moving, romantic story about second chances, the weight of dreams and finding your way back to the people who feel like home.

Readers can't stop talking about Just Friends . . .
‘Honestly, I was so pleasantly surprised and completely blown away by this book’
‘I cannot stress enough how much fun I had with this book!’
‘The ending had an absolute chokehold on me’
‘They didn’t feel like characters; they felt like real people who had lived a whole life before the pages even started’
‘This is a couple I’ll be thinking about for a long time’
‘This book felt like having my favourite playlist on repeat’
'It felt light, bright and sparkled like only some books do' Contemporary Heartfelt Romance
All stars
Most relevant
"Don't judge a debut😢"

I thought self-honesty was meant to be sexy in the 2020s but whatever I guess. Anyway, this wasn't it.

No.

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I wanted to love this story, as is my hope for all the books I read, but unfortunately for me personally, it was very average for a YA at best. The first 40% struggled to find its flow and writing style, making it a clunky unenjoyable reading experience. I have no issue when authors use an advanced vocabulary but it has to be relevant to the story and align with the characters they are writing about, Just Friends reads as a YA and using highly unnecessary ‘big words’ in sentences pertaining to conversations or actions of 17 year olds just felt so out of place that it takes you out of the flow of the story, sentences like ‘He nods infinitesimally’, or ‘I had to yield to a conglomerate of pedestrians’ and many other examples where it just felt overwritten and out of place for these young characters in a YA style read. This story for me, lacked any character development and depth, it was written very much in a tell not show style, which kept me uninvested. We were told time and time again, how much grief the FMC was going through, yet as a reader I experienced no emotional depth or exploration of the connection of relationship to the person she was grieving, and likewise we were told how the FMC longed, yearned and wanted the MMC and vice versa yet were weren’t ever given any development or depth to their connection or relationship so it wasn’t believable and I didn’t invest at all in these characters, to me they came off very one dimensional. I as a reader love to feel for characters and connect with them and invest in their stories and that didn’t happen for me reading this book. I appreciate this was a debut novel, but having just finished debut novels like The Bright Years, Slanting Towards The Sea and even The Rose Bargain which is also YA, all of which were 5 stars reads for me, Just Friends did not hit for me at all. Overall the writing style was clunky, the mass of random Thesaurus words were trying too hard and simply out of place, the characters lacked any development and depth and it was an out of the box plot that was all tell and no show, it was just too basic for my reading taste. I personally would say this is a simple Young Adult novel, that many would find enjoyable for what it is.

A simple and basic YA story.

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