I've been reading Jacquelyn Middleton for a few years now and I love how sweet, real, and entertaining her novels are. Say Hello, Kiss Goodbye was released in November 2020 and I found myself saving it until I needed a contemporary romance mood booster. I finally read it early in 2021 and enjoyed being whisked away to London while learning more about a character readers had met in an earlier novel.
Here's the synopsis:
Leia Scott has sworn off love. Fresh from a messy, public divorce from her hockey player ex, the twenty-six-year-old fashion designer temporarily trades New York for London to heal and embrace her freedom. Her vow? To protect her heart, steer clear of relationships, and say yes to flings without strings. She throws herself into designing upcycled dresses and exploring London with her sister. But Leia’s carefully curated plan encounters a flirty complication with an irresistible British accent.
Wealthy, charming, and devastatingly attractive, Tarquin Balfour is tired of meaningless hookups and dates that go nowhere. For years, he has played the bon viveur with reckless abandon, throwing decadent parties, sleeping with a parade of women, and diving into extreme sports around the globe. But now the young property developer wants more. He craves love and commitment, to prove his kind heart matters more than the abundance of zeroes attached to his bank balance. Struggling with undiagnosed depression, Tarquin worries he’ll never find The One…until he meets his princess, a fashion designer named Leia.
Afraid of falling in love and fearful of being alone, Leia and Tarquin enter into an entanglement that threatens to hurt them both.
I didn't quite love this one as much as I wanted to. And, the most frustrating thing is, I don't know why. It could have been that the characters didn't become as three dimensional as I'd like. I got a good sense of them but it felt surface level, apart from their real and honest talks about their mental health. The story also overlaps with Middleton's previous novels and characters we've already met popped up. I liked that but it also sometimes felt like the story was being shoehorned into a world that had already been created. They fit into the world, of course, but I think I would have liked a story that was just Tarquin and Leia's.
Back to the mental health aspect of the story. I so appreciate that Middleton is an Own Voices author when it comes to talking about anxiety and depression. Her characters have honest conversations (eventually) about their struggles and how what they're going through doesn't always "look" like depression. It's not preachy, it's not especially difficult to read. It's just there, matter of fact. Which I think is so important. We all know someone who has depression and/or anxiety and I'm sure we're all discovering that our mental health has taken a major hit over the past ten months. I am so glad authors like Middleton lay it all out there in a way that should help others understand and find a bit more compassion and empathy.
I really enjoyed the armchair travel Say Hello, Kiss Goodbye provided, especially because my sister is currently living in London, where most of the novel was set. She can't travel to most of the places in the novel right now because of a third lockdown, but it still made me feel closer to her, somehow. Middleton has family in the UK so she is very familiar with the locations she writes about. That helped make it feel even more real and also made me desperate to visit England again! I especially want to get back to Scotland to see more of the country including the Orkney Islands where Leia and Tarquin spend some time with his family. It sounds magical!
Say Hello, Kiss Goodbye is a great contemporary romance to read if you're looking to escape to another city (or, if you happen to live in London, escape to a city you can't explore right now) or if you want to enjoy a love story that's meant to be even if the characters fight against it. I'm looking forward to what Jacquelyn Middleton writes next.
*A copy of this novel was provided by the author in exchange for review consideration. All opinions are honest and my own.*
