Review: A Love Like the Sun by Riss M. Neilson

I received this book via the publisher Berkley. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of this review.

A Love Like the Sun by Riss M. Neilson
Published by Berkley on 2024-06-11
Length: 368 pages
Reviewing eARC from the publisher Berkley
Rating:
Reading Challenges: #NGEW2024, 2024 COYER Unwind

Lifelong best friends spend a fateful summer discovering what might happen if they were to be something more in this radiant, heart-clenching adult debut.

Laniah Thompson is a homebody who craves privacy. Issac Jordan is internet famous and spends his days followed by paparazzi. She runs a small business with her mom in her hometown. He runs an international brand.

And they’ve been best friends since childhood.

When Issac comes home to Providence for the first time in months and discovers Laniah’s dream is slipping out of reach as she and her mom struggle to pay the bills at Wildly Green, their natural hair store, she refuses to take a dime from him. And so, he does what any self-respecting best friend would do: tells the world they’re dating.

Suddenly business is booming, and Laniah agrees to his ridiculous plan to pretend to be lovers for the course of the summer. Just long enough to catch the eye of an investor and get her dream back on track, like she helped him do so many years ago, he reminds her.

Too soon, though, Laniah knows she’s playing with fire, because for as long as they’ve been friends there’s an undeniable pull they’ve never given in to. And as the lines between art and life—real and pretend—blur, it becomes harder and harder to see where friendship ends and something else begins....

Told over the course of three sizzling summer months, A Love Like the Sun is about shared history, those who make us our bravest selves, and love in its many forms.

Sweet friends-to-lovers romance. A Love Like the Sun by Riss M. Neilson is a contemporary romance about two best friends who fake a relationship to save the other’s business and reputation. Laniah Thompson is an introverted business owner whose business is currently failing. Isaac Jordan is a social media darling and puts his art, and life, out for the world to see. When he returns home for a visit with his best friend and finds Laniah is closing her business, he hatches a plan to save it. They fake a relationship for the summer and use his popularity to grow her clientele. The only problem is not catching feelings in the process.

Laniah is a great narrator. The story is told entirely from her perspective. She’s introverted and has high anxiety. Couple that anxiety with the fact that something in her body feels off and you have a recipe for disaster. Losing her father at a young age has rewritten Laniah’s outlook on life, and she lives a lot of it scared to love and be loved. Her business is her mother’s dream but also hers as well. She loves helping others find what works for their natural hair and what to avoid.

Isaac is a conundrum. He is just as shy as Laniah seems to be, yet he flourishes under the spotlight. He’s built a brand with his art and style. Now living across the country from his best friend to pursue that art has left a hole in Laniah’s life. She misses him and feels like he is slipping away each day. A fake relationship is not the answer she expected when he planned to help her business. And just putting the label of girlfriend/boyfriend on each other brings a level of intimacy to their relationship that’s never been in question before. Laniah wants him, but she is terrified of losing her best friend. And this fear plays into a lot of the book.

I wanted to love this story, and there are aspects I certainly love, but some of it fell flat. I loved the sweet, easy relationship Laniah and Isaac have. That only comes from knowing someone for as long as they do. I enjoyed Laniah’s relationship with her mom and other friends in the book. I struggled with the spicy scenes. They didn’t flow well with the rest of the story. While I understand that it is a story about how they are developing feelings for one another, there wasn’t any build-up of tension between them before the sex scenes. The scenes themselves also didn’t really match the personalities of the characters. It was like looking in on two totally different people than they were the rest of the book.

Overall, I enjoyed A Love Like the Sun. It reads more like women’s fiction than romance though there are definitely some romantic and sweet moments throughout the story. If you are a fan of friends-to-lovers romance, I highly recommend it.

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