Score: 4/5 Bookmarks

Steam rating: 🍆🍆🍆 /5

Thank you to St Martin’s and Macmillan Audio for gifting me review copies of Make Up Break Up by Lily Menon.

Annika Dev is creating an app with her best friend that will give couples tools to help mend breaks in their relationships and level up their communication. The tech they are working on is cutting edge, and Annika is proud of what she’s doing.

Along comes Hudson Craft with his app, Break Up, where they will essentially break up with someone on your behalf. It’s become wildly successful since it launched and basically goes against everything Annika believes in.

To rub salt into the wound, Annika and Hudson hooked up at a conference in Vegas, and now the annoying, and annoyingly good-looking, app-idea-stealing douche has moved his office into her building! This means war!

I love a good enemies to lovers stories, and I enjoyed both of these main characters so much. They were both layered and nuanced and had plenty of their own baggage to sort through so it was rewarding to watch them grow throughout the book.

I had hoped the ending was going to go a particular way, which I, unfortunately, can’t talk about without spoiling the book, but I did really enjoy it none-the-less. If you’re looking for a sweet, feel-good rom-com complete with mariachi music and nerf-gun fights you’ll for sure want to pick this one up.

The audiobook was narrated by Natalie Naudus who I absolutely love. You might also recognize her voice from A Sweet Mess, The Unraveling of Cassidy Holmes, All Girls, and so many more. The audio comes in at nine hours and 15 minutes so you’ll race through it in no time.

Grab the audiobook via the button below, or get a physical copy here.

Synopsis:

Love, romance, second chances, fairy-tale endings…these are the things Annika Dev believes in. Her app, Make Up, has been called the “Google Translate for failing relationships.”

High efficiency break-ups, flashy start-ups, penthouses, fast cars…these are the things Hudson Craft believes in. His app, Break Up, is known as the “Uber for break-ups.” It’s wildly successful—and anathema to Annika’s life philosophy.

Which wouldn’t be a problem if they’d gone their separate ways after that summer fling in Las Vegas, never to see each other again. Unfortunately for Annika, Hudson’s moving not just into her office building, but into the office right next to hers. And he’ll be competing at the prestigious EPIC investment pitch contest: A contest Annika needs to win if she wants to keep Make Up afloat. As if it’s not bad enough seeing his irritatingly perfect face on magazine covers when her own business is failing. As if knowing he stole her idea and twisted it into something vile—and monumentally more successful—didn’t already make her stomach churn.

As the two rival app developers clash again and again—and again—Annika finds herself drawn into Hudson Craft’s fast-paced, high velocity, utterly shallow world. Only, from up close, he doesn’t seem all that shallow. Could it be that everything she thought about Hudson is completely wrong? Could the creator of Break Up teach her what true love’s really about?