Rating: 3 Stars

Publisher: Leslie McAdam

Genre: Gay Romance

Tags: Contemporary, Bi Character, Friends-to-Lovers, Romance, Series

Length: 200 Pages

Reviewer: Cindi

Purchase At: Amazon

This review has a few spoilers. Keep that in mind before reading.

Blurb –

My hot best friend has no idea what he’s doing to me.

He sends me naughty texts at the most inappropriate times. He lets me fall asleep on top of him when we watch movies. And his protective side comes out if I dance too close to anyone at our favorite club.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but those are things a boyfriend does. Except August isn’t my boyfriend, he’s my bestfriend, and those lines are drawn in permanent marker. The one time we tried to cross the boundary between friends and lovers, it failed so spectacularly that we never did it again. So … “friends” is good enough. That’s what I tell myself. Because at least I have him in my life. Without him, I’d be lost.

But after we’re dared to kiss, and that kiss reshapes reality, we agree to be friends who do things with each other. Nakey things.

That makes my life so much better. And so much worse. After all, August doesn’t want to settle down, and he never wants to get married. While I do.

Most importantly, no matter how our relationship changes, he can’t find out I’m desperately in love with him.

Oblivious is a sweet and steamy contemporary m/m romance about best friends who don’t know they’re already dating. Noah and August are always touching, finish each other’s sentences, and bristle whenever the other gets within six feet of a date, but they can’t see what’s crystal clear to everyone else. Oblivious features badly timed schmexy texts, a hot kiss that rocks two men’s universes, and (unofficially, but likely) the highest number of heartfelt marriage proposals in a romance novel ever.

Review –

One of my favorite tropes is best friends-to-lovers. There’s something about when it clicks for both guys that what they’ve been feeling hasn’t just been friendship. Those books almost always work for me. I want to say that Oblivious did, but I’m typing this unsure of how I felt about the book.

The title is Oblivious, as you can see, but there’s oblivious and there’s August. Nobody is that clueless, especially not for two and a half decades. Every single person in the law firm he and Noah founded knows that Noah is in love with him. Every single person except August.

This starts off really well. Noah, abandoned by his mother and shipped off to his grandparents, moves in next door to August. They’re both nine at the time. August, the more blunt and outgoing of the two, immediately took Noah under his wing and told him they were best friends. And they were, from that day on. They did everything together growing up, including coming out around the same time. August is bisexual, and Noah is gay. They went to law school together, and as adults, opened their own firm that specializes in LGBTQ+ causes, Weston & Ramirez.

Good so far.

They spend more time at each other’s homes than their own – they live in condos a few feet away from each other – and they cuddle, make each other breakfast, and do other coupley things. Only they’re not a couple, much to Noah’s chagrin. They tried fooling around in high school, but they were young and inexperienced, so it didn’t work out. They never tried again.

Everything comes to a head of sorts when their favorite server at the local gay club dares them to kiss.

It was totally giving off a teenager vibe, like spin the bottle with Alden in Studious. But unlike Alden who never got his kiss from his crush, these two go hot and heavy, having to force themselves apart.

That kiss is when the book started falling apart a bit for me. What should have been an A ha! moment for August had him disappearing for a day or two, when he usually sees and talks to Noah several times a day. They eventually did start doing things like before, but it was strained on both ends. Even when they eventually started fooling around, it was awkward; for the reader anyway. They do eventually come together, obviously, but I was totally over it by then.

More issues I had with the book –

• Noah’s mother. She’s a textbook narcissist. Narcissists do not see the so-called error of their ways in an instant and suddenly change. I know this from experience with my own mother.
• Total lack of communication when they’d been sharing every single detail of their lives for twenty-five years.
• Childish and silly for two grown men. They were thirty-four, not fourteen. They were also business partners. Noah was obviously the brains behind all the law firm stuff while August pretty much did what August wanted to do. In other words, he constantly deferred to Noah. Oh, he handled cases, but he didn’t want to be bothered with the business side of it. It kind of freaked him out.
• Silly proposals. While I totally understand where the author was going with it – Noah felt they went too quickly from best friends to ‘let’s get married’ with no real dating in between – they got ridiculous. Also, why would anybody keep doing public proposals when they know they’re going to be rejected each time? Uh, no.
• August. I just couldn’t bring myself to like him. He went from not seeing Noah as anything other than a friend to falling head over heels in love with him in a millisecond. Noah always loved August. August never saw Noah ‘that way’ at all, and then bam! he was in love with him and wanted to marry him.
• ‘Goodness gracious, oh my golly gosh.’ Come on now. There’s not being one to curse a lot, though Noah did, in fact, curse a lot, but seriously? That’s an exact quote from the book, by the way.
• Gulp. Do people really gulp in real life as much as they do in this author’s books? Just curious.

I did love August’s family and Noah’s grandfather. I loved the banter between the two guys early on. I loved seeing other characters from the books I’ve read so far. I absolutely adored Shelby, the firm’s receptionist. I loved Noah. I just could not find it in me to love August and Noah together. I tried, but I never could feel it because of how weird things got after their first very public kiss. As just friends, they were perfect together. Anything beyond that fell flat.

3 stars.