HOW TO LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR, a sweet HEA straight rom-com

HOW TO LOVE YOUR NEIGHBOR
SOPHIE SULLIVAN
St. Martin's Press
$16.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Enemies-to-lovers meets HGTV in this frothy, effervescent romantic comedy from Sophie Sullivan, author of Ten Rules for Faking It.

Interior Design School? Check. Cute house to fix up? Check.

Sexy, grumpy neighbor who is going to get in the way of your plans? Check. Unfortunately.

Grace Travis has it all figured out. In between finishing school and working a million odd jobs, she’ll get her degree and her dream job. Most importantly, she’ll have a place to belong, something her harsh mother could never make. When an opportunity to fix up—and live in—a little house on the beach comes along, Grace is all in. Until her biggest roadblock moves in next door.

Noah Jansen knows how to make a deal. As a real estate developer, he knows when he's found something special. Something he could even call home. Provided he can expand by taking over the house next door—the house with the combative and beautiful woman living in it.

With the rules for being neighborly going out the window, Grace and Noah are in an all-out feud. But sometimes, your nemesis can show you that home is always where the heart is.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: When Irresistible Force Met Immovable Object is a romantic-fiction staple. The reason it works, time upon time after time, is that the plot never stops feeling...probable, plausible, possible. "Surely *I* will succeed where others have failed," we think with the point-of-view character. The gendered expressions of this...a man who needs to Fix It, a woman who needs to Change It...are both present here.

Why does it work? Because we're told it will, does it become a self-fulfilling prophecy? Um...how's that workin' in real life, then....

So reading this iteration of the old story is pointless, then? Nope. Not a bit of it, as you'll find out when you settle in for a dank winter's afternoon of page-borne cheerfulness. Two people with frankly selfish agendas meet with no obvious path to compromise, only of necessity the victory of Party A over Party B. For most of human history that set-up plays out that way. Given the nature of Grace's upbringing I expected it to be that way this time too, with her gladly giving up her utterly unknown grandparents' little bungalow for the handsome prince's home. Why, there's a way we can subvert expectations, thinks Author Sullivan...so instead of making Grace a gracious loser who wins the bigger prize, the neighbors mend their fences (figurative and literal) in more lasting ways. Therein the way the subversion works best.

What plays well with me, maybe predictably, is Grace's (ugh) gracious (sorry) inclusion of elders in her life. Her deeply toxic mother wasn't a mom, and her thus-inevitable lifelong search for found family is relatable to me. What makes it even sweeter, in the sugary sense, is that she volunteers for caretaker duties with older men who need her for practical reasons...Morty's the proverbial old fool whose unwillingness to grow up even as he grows old will be the death of him much to his gal-pal (NOT "girlfriend" ugh!) Tilly's disgust...but whom she in her turn needs for the long-missing and urgently needed sense of Belonging that older people anchor younger ones with. It is something I've played out from both sides at different times in my life, and it's always worked out well. So far.

So that's the plus side...the downside is real too. The two characters alternate viewpoints, which I approve of as a device in these "he-said-she-said" narratives. The execution...

"You're a very curious and capable woman."

She beamed at him. "Thank you."

He just laughed. Maybe the women he usually hung out with liked different compliments.
–and–
Biting his cheek to keep from smiling, he nodded, then asked, "You think I'm handsome?"

She turned away before her eyeroll was complete. "I'm about to Julia Roberts your credit cards so make sure you're prepared."

No points for guessing which is from whose point of view. Grace gets the best lines...it is really her book, so fair enough...but if you go to the trouble of setting up the dichotomy, even out the benefits for it to work as well as it can. I was more convinced that these insta-luuuv sufferers were being presented to me this way so I would really understand why the lust each quite justifiably fell into went deeper. This was undermined by the aforementioned inequality of quality, if you'll forgive the excursion into recursion.

There is quite a cast of characters to keep track of...Rosie, Chris are the BFFs but Chris is also a sibling; Kyle's a contractor whose life as a dad we're treated to glimpses of but Josh is another whose appearances are frequent enough that I was left wondering why he wasn't a bigger part of the story...though I myownself don't see that as a problem, it does contribute to what I honestly feel is a big one: It's too long. I'm interested in Grace's interior design process, I'm appreciative of that layer of verisimilitude offered me, and I still want less of it. The exchanges with Morty and Tilly are amusing, but honestly? Less is more, emulate Le Corbusier when you're inching up on 400pp. And, I realize this is probably just me, but good goddesses please no more painting-as-foreplay! I got headaches from it.

In the end, as one knows it will, the story's HEA comes as no surprise but does come wrapped in a semi-lethal dose of feel-goodish sweetness. It's a lovely moment, the one that ends the book, and would film well...something I don't doubt was in the author's mind...and it gives us the thing that romantic fiction readers need: closure without foreclosure. The parties are together, big shock; but they're not on shaky ground, there's no magical elimination of the obstacles in their world. That always means to me that the author's got respect for her readers. Using deus ex machina is always a cheap trick and it's one that Sophie Sullivan did not succumb to the obvious pointers to use. Kudos for that, and could you please use your PowerPoint skills to wean other authors off it?