Book Review: Zora Books Her Happy Ever After

Zora Books Her Happy Ever After by Taj McCoy ~ 336 pages ~ to be published on April 25, 2023 by Mira

Goodreads Synopsis:

Zora has committed every inch of her life to establishing her thriving DC bookstore, making it into a pillar of the community, and she just hasn’t had time for romance. But when a mystery author she’s been crushing on for years agrees to have an event at her store, she starts to rethink her priorities. Lawrence is every bit as charming as she imagined, even if his understanding of his own books seems just a bit shallow. When he asks her out after his reading, she’s almost elated enough to forget about the grumpy guy who sat next to her making snide comments all evening. Apparently the grouch is Lawrence’s best friend, Reid, but she can’t imagine what kind of friendship that must be. They couldn’t be more different.

But as she starts seeing Lawrence, and spending more and more time with Reid, Zora finds first impressions can be deceiving. Reid is smart and thoughtful—he’s also interested. After years of avoiding dating, she suddenly has two handsome men competing for her affection. But even as she struggles to choose between them, she can’t shake the feeling that they’re both hiding something—a mystery she’s determined to solve before she can find her HEA.

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What I Thought:

*I received this book for free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review. Thank you so much to NetGalley and Mira for this ARC!*

I am a sucker for a book about books, or bookstores, or libraries, etc, so I was very intrigued by this book! I am also a big romance fan, so count me in!

I really liked all of the parts of the book about Zora’s bookstore and what she puts into running and managing it. I found this part of the book fascinating. I loved hearing her plans for book/author/store promotions, store events, social media planning. It was gratifying to my organizational lizard brain.

Zora’s relationships with her grandmother and her best friend were lovely. I really liked how the author leaned into these relationships. It really helped to make Zora’s character more fleshed out. They were all zany and lovable.

Now, as for the romance aspect of this story, I’m not a huge fan of love triangles where people are knowingly dating multiple people at once. It makes me uncomfortable personally, so that part of this book was a bit hard for me to get into. Also, I felt that the choice between the two men was pretty obvious from the jump, but that’s all I’ll say on that.

Also, I figured out the big twist right away. I thought it was incredibly obvious, in large part thanks to the synopsis itself. Perhaps that was intentional, in which case ignore me.

Overall, I really liked the bookstore and the family/friendship parts of this book. The romance was not my favorite, but that is just personal preference.