Ten Trends to Seduce Your Bestfriend by Penny Reid _ Book Review

Winnifred Gobaldi and Byron Visser are not best friends.

Yes, they’ve known each other for years, but they’re not even friendly. Winnie considers them more like casual, distant acquaintances who find each other barely tolerable, especially when he’s being condescending (which is all the time).

The truth is, they have nothing in common. She’s a public school science teacher with stars in her eyes, and he’s a pretentious, joyless double PhD turned world-famous bestselling fiction author. She loves sharing her passion for promulgating women in STEM careers and building community via social media, and he eschews all socialization, virtual or otherwise. She’s looking for a side hustle to help pay down a mountain of student debt, and his financial portfolio is the stuff of fiduciary wet dreams. So why are they faking a #bestfriend relationship for millions of online spectators?

When a simple case of tit-for-tat trends between nonfriends leads to a wholly unexpected kind of pretend, nothing is simple. Sometimes, it takes a public audience to reveal the truth of private feelings, and rarely—very rarely—you should believe what you see online.

Ten Trends to Seduce Your Bestfriend is a full-length, complete standalone, adult contemporary romantic comedy.

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Winnifred Gobaldi and Byron Visser are not best friends.

Ten Trends to Seduce Your Bestfriend is a full-length, complete standalone, adult contemporary romantic comedy

[I received a digital arc for an honest review]

Ten Trends to Seduce Your Bestfriend by Penny Reid is a dislike to friends to lovers romance between two brilliant and somewhat awkward people.

Winnifred loves teaching science she loves sharing her passion for STEM with others, so outside of teaching she has an internet presence, even if it’s a small one. A chance at a dream job offer has her contemplating ways of getting a larger internet audience. Her friend tells her she should branch out of STEM specifics and show the world her feminine side. This leads her to agreeing to do the famous TikTok boyfriend challenges and ends up working with Byron. Byron who makes her uncomfortable and feel inadequate. He’s blunt and honest yet the more time they spend together, the more she realizes there is so much more to him than she originally thought. But can two people who seem so outwardly different, one a people person and one very much not, realistically have a future together.

Now begins the part of my review where I lose all semblance of order and structure. I have conflicting feelings about this book. I was enjoying it for the first 50% and then it lost my for a bit there and grabbed my attention back when the physical intimacy between them notched up around 70%. The characters felt very immature to me. I would constantly forget they were in their late 20s until they would go to open up a bottle of wine lol . Winnie for someone who was such a people person it’s not very good at social cues and she was very much an overthinker. Byron, while he isn’t labeled on the autism spectrum, I loved representation of neurodivergent people finding the love they deserve. What I didn’t love was that at one point Winnie takes it on herself to diagnoses him, telling him he has sensory processing disorder which leads him to discovering he does in fact have one. In my opinion, unless you’re a very close friend, or family than it’s not anyone’s place to diagnose developmental issues of another person in any way. I also really don’t like the miscommunication trope, it’s one of my least favorite and it seemed like because of both of their inability to interpret what the other meant, half the time they were arguing about two different subjects at once.

“You feel like what I imagine bliss would if I could manifest the word as a tangible, touchable thing.”

I feel like all I’ve done is say things I didn’t like about this book, but I really did enjoy him. Byron was charming and sweet, and his unconditional love for Winnie was just *Swoon*. The way he tried so hard to be better for her and then in the end realizes his own self-worth was just EVERYTHING. This book honestly wouldn’t have been the same without his POV. I also really liked their mutual best friend Amelia, she was #friendgoals. Then there’s the intimacy between Byron and Winnie, I liked the consensual aspect to their intimacy and the communication. They both are inexperienced in that area and made sure that each other were comfortable along the way of their exploration.

Overall, I think a lot of readers will love Ten Trends to Seduce Your Bestfriend by Penny Reid, I unfortunately didn’t love or hate it. It fell somewhere in the middle for me.