Texting With the Enemy

Boston and El - finding love digitally and IRL This is the first book in the Digital Dating series. In my opinion, for an enemies to lovers trope to work well, the author has to find a balance between animosity between the main characters without tipping into meanness or abuse. The authors found the perfect sweet spot in this book. Boston Cunningham has always felt responsible and serious but after the unexpected death of his father, he feels even more uber-responsible for his family’s company and for his mother’s fledgling winery. Isabel/El is an accountant at Boston’s family company, a wine distributor, but she dreams of being a sales person. Despite his attraction and respect for El from afar, Boston, unfortunately, says all the wrong things to El when she interviews for a sales position at the company and he turns her down. At a wine festival El unknowingly meets Boston’s mother and gets a job as a sales person with her winery. At the same festival she dances with Chad, a friend of Boston’s, who gives El Boston’s number instead of his own. Thus begins the dual love story of El and “Chad” (really Boston) who have a text relationship and El and Boston who begin to have a relationship IRL while he is training her at the new winery. This book has a little bit of everything on the journey to Boston and El’s HEA - sweet moments, heart squeezing encounters, family support, painful pasts, and laugh out loud scenes. I love when real life issues - like family difficulties, deaths, financial problems, and difficult childhoods - are included in romances, it makes for more three dimensional characters and more well rounded and relatable storylines. I will definitely keep reading more of this great series. Madeleine Dauer and Alex Kydd did a wonderful job narrating the story and characters into life with enough change of inflection, tone and cadence to voice multiple characters quite convincingly.

I really enjoyed the humor in this book. There were so many quirky sentences sprinkled through just waiting to be read and laughed over. I never knew what was coming next. Boston's grand gesture is a thing that must be read to be believed. I laughed through that whole scene! I was pulling for Boston and El the whole time, and I look forward to getting to know his brothers. Another thing that I liked about this book was that it was clean and low angst. There is only mild swearing and some kissing, and both of these things felt right for this story. I have recently been burned by a few books that were labeled comedies and then started springing very dark things on me. Yes, El and Boston are carrying some baggage and concerns, but we don't have to slog through all kinds of grief and torment to understand how they feel. The harder parts are realistic but kept light enough for a romcom. I appreciated that very much. I wholeheartedly recommend this for when you need a fun, romantic read that keeps a good pace and a steady stream of laughs. The audiobook is a lot of fun, too. The narrators did a great job bringing El and Boston to life and also with the zany things happening.