FEUD has been on my TBR ever since Kaia Danielle recommended this book when we interviewed her, and after the last few weeks, I really needed a book to make me laugh.
If you feel the same way, FEUD is the book for you.
The book opens in Justice Lawson's POV, and you get little teases of the history that's kept this century long feud between the Lawsons and the Bridges-es going. He's been waiting 6 months since his next-door-neighbor, Old Man Bridges, passed on so that he can claim an inheritance.
Then we meet the heroine, Alex Bridges, who finds out that yes, her great-uncle was still alive and he's left her a house... and a feud. There's a scene where she's watching the video her great-uncle left her and it made me laugh so hard my kid asked if I was okay. Anyway, she's got an inheritance, too.
The trick to getting those inheritances? Each of them is tied to the feud. If a Lawson is the last one standing, they get a big bank account. If a Bridges is the last one standing, they get a big bank account. No, they're not the same account. It's another part of the feud - they both had to do it to spite the other family. *cackling*
One warning - Justice is a chef, and you will be hungry reading this book. The cinnamon walnut muffins in particular made me want to go right over to the pantry and get to baking. (Sadly, it was 11 o'clock at night.) Justice is also, and I intend this pun, a cinnamon roll. He had saved up a lot of money in order to open his own restaurant, but when his grandma got sick, he moved back home and spent it all on in-home caregivers and expensive medication to extend her life and quality of life.
Alex isn't so much a cinnamon roll, but she's also really good at her job as an advertising campaign manager. She even manages to get a job when she moves into her great-uncle's house after something particularly dastardly that Justice does as part of the feud. I don't want to spoil it for you, but they get up to some creative shenanigans as they try to convince the other person to move out and thus lose the feud.
This is a romance, though, so the whole time they're wanting to tear each other apart, they're also thinking about tearing each other's clothes off. Bourne chose to have the main characters talk directly to the reader throughout the book, which adds some hilarious inner dialogue to the story. You know how sometimes you're reading a book and a character is clearly fighting their feelings? Bourne skips right to it and has the character say something like "Am I developing feelings for this woman? That's my own business." I loved the cinematic feel of this, like when a character in a film looks at the camera and gives you a wink.
Each chapter also starts out with a saying, like this one:
"The grass isn't greener on the other side. It's just fertilized with Lawson bullshit."
TL, DR -
This book was exactly what I needed and made me laugh the entire time. I'm told that Phyllis Bourne is the Queen of Romantic Comedy and I gotta say - if this is an example of her work, I'm going back for more.
If enemies-to-lovers is your trope of choice, you'll love this book. And at 150 pages, it's just the right amount of laugh-your-butt-off for a gloomy afternoon.
