As you may well know, I started flexing my romance-genre muscle last year; and man, all the cute things I’ve come across! Why didn’t y’all say!!?

I present to you, cute thing number … (I lost count, LOL): A Brush With Love by Mazey Eddings. In this one we follow Harper Horowitz, a dental student with ambition, determination, goals and a trauma induced mental illness. Her love interest is Dan Craige, fellow dental student with family baggage and years of abuse he’s trying to navigate.

These two quite literally bump into each other. I must say, this was one of my favourite meet cutes. The love story that ensues is such a fun yet vulnerable tale of friendship, support and human flaws.

I’ve said before that my only real problem with romance stories is when the heartache occurs. I mean, a part of me gets it, in the real world everything is not all prince charming and roses, but still, books are fiction! Give us the fairytale!

Now that the venting is out of the way … the unfolding of the heartache in A Brush With Love really hits differently. For me it was a moment of no return. I had convinced myself that Mazey would break our hearts and leave them on the floor for us to sweep up. It was both unbearable and downright mean! But you know what they say, ‘hurt people, hurt people’, I suppose the same can be said about broken people.

There is so much richness in this story. How it navigates grief, sisterhood by way of girlfriend relationships, abuse, mental health, following ones dreams, and love, are all treated with such earnest sincerity.

Don’t get me wrong, Mazey didn’t skimp on the spice, but I’m quickly learning that the romances that stick with me have less spice and more heart; and heart, she brought! Not only that but her characters were funny, vivid and believable. I don’t know how many times I cracked up laughing while hybrid reading this (on audio and hard copy). I am one of those readers who sees a reel of the ‘movie version’ of the book they read – well to be honest this isn’t true for all books, some don’t get me there, but this, this I can see on the big screen as one of the cutest things!

I was so invested in this couple that when Mazey chose the high road of a happy ending, my heart truly swelled and my smile definitely got brighter!