Noelle Shepard is grieving the loss of her beloved grandmother when she discovers decades-old photos and letters that hint to a forbidden love in her gram’s past. Needing to know the full story, she creates a TikTok video appealing for information – and it goes viral.
Through her video, she manages to track down her grandmother’s secret love, Paul, who offers to take her on the honeymoon road-trip he and Gram planned but never got to go on.
Noelle jumps at the chance to make this one last connection with her grandmother. There’s just one problem – Paul’s grandson is Noelle’s frustratingly handsome high-school rival Theo.
And Theo has to come, too.
- Title: You, with a View
- Author: Jessica Joyce
- Publisher: Berkley
- Publication Date: July 11, 2023
- Genre: Contemporary Romance
- Targeted Age Range: Adult
- Content Warnings: Grief, death, estranged family
- Rating: ★.5
You, with a View came highly recommended to me by a friend — if you dialed it down to its tropes, it would theoretically check off all my boxes: academic rivals to lovers, road trip, Letters to Juliet-y, a contemporary romance book with a strong grief storyline. And yet, there was something lacking about it for me.
All her life, Noelle’s closest confidant was her grandmother; the two of them would often play a game called “Tell Me a Secret”. But when she discovers some photographs, and a letter between her grandmother, and a man named Paul about an elopement, it turns out that her late grandmother had more secrets than Noelle knew about. When her TikTok about it goes viral, the last person she expects to comment on it is her former high school rival, Theo, who lets her know that the man in the photographs is his grandfather, Paul. Quickly forming a bond with Paul (and begrudgingly, Theo), they decide to embark on what would’ve been her grandmother and Paul’s honeymoon road trip.
You, with a View was fine. Overwhelmingly fine, to the point where I just felt bored while reading it. I didn’t particularly feel a lot of chemistry between the two characters; I felt like there should be more push and pull, more yearning. For two people who formerly were rivals, I wanted there to be a little more tension. I just felt like the two of them needed to do a lot of growing up and I felt like the majority of their feelings for each other were just centered around the fact that they were horny, and in the same place. Sometimes, I’ll finish a book and go “oh, these two would never last in the real world” and that’s really how I felt about this book. If it wasn’t for the fact that the two of them were in the same place and stuck together, I don’t think they would’ve worked out. I think this book would’ve benefited from well, some depth, but also just some more flashbacks to their high school days — something that showed us they had some kind of connection.
I wanted to like Noelle so bad, and it’s not that I disliked her — I just didn’t feel anything for her. I felt like Jessica Joyce really just tells us what we’re supposed to feel or know, rather than showing us. Noelle was grieving for her grandmother, yet we never really saw that. She was really close to her family, and we saw just a few mentions of that. And Theo … well, I never really found him charming. I’m pretty sure I was supposed to find his emotionally vulnerable self endearing but it just never happened. I understood that he had his own issues — and honestly found his career plotline to be a lot more interesting than Noelle’s.
Honestly, the saving grace of this book was Paul, and the storyline between Noelle’s grandmother and him. I found the letters that they exchanged to be interesting, and also one of the few things that kept me reading. What happened between the two of them? Why did things end up this way? That was the only thing that kept me hooked and intrigued.
It really feels like I’m in the minority with this one; all my friends rated this a five star, if not a four star read, and I’m over here sitting between the two and three star mark. Don’t be discouraged by my thoughts, you might like this one a lot more than I did!
Links for You, with a View: Goodreads | TheStorygraph | Bookshop.org
Jessica grew up a voracious reader who loved to lose herself in books (ask her about her impressive ability to walk and read at the same time, mastered after many years of practice). Thanks to a family full of romance-novel-loving women, she discovered love stories and never looked back, especially when she realized she could lose herself in the words she created.
She now lives happily-ever-ongoing with her husband and son in the Bay Area. When she’s not writing character-driven, realistic and relatable tales of millennials who are just Doing Their Best while falling in love, you can find her listening to one of her dozens of chaotically curated Spotify playlists, trying out a new skincare face mask, crying over cute animal TikToks, or watching the 2005 version of Pride & Prejudice.
