Rating~ 3.5 stars
TW: Homophobia, alcohol addiction, racism, islamophobia and cheating (quite a lot). Brief mentions of PTSD as heroine was in the military.

Generally, I don’t go out of my way to read cheating stories but occasionally I’ve come across some done really well and because the blurb promised some angst and pining I wanted to give it a try. I hadn't anything before from Melissa Lenhardt either.

Set in a small town in Texas, The Secret of You and Me introduces us to Nora and Sophie. Nora Noakes was kicked out by her father at 18 after finishing high school. She went on to join the army and later becomes a language specialist. Sophie Wyatt at 18 got pregnant by her best friends boyfriend, went on to marry him and become the town’s Convention and Visitors Bureau president.

Nora and Sophie had been best friends since they were children and fell in love in their senior year. They had grand plans before everything came crashing down. They now have completely different lives than they once imagined. Coming face to face after 18 years of separation at Nora’s fathers funeral shows them their love and passion never died and this threatens their now safely constructed lives.

The Secret of You and Me falls under the second chance romance and friends to lovers trope.

This was a pretty easy book to get lost into, the drama and angst of it all keeps you intrigued. We see old hurts and lingering love in Nora and Sophie as soon as they meet. Clearing up their past and making up though might destroy their current lives and that is something they are both afraid of. The characters in this book are very flawed. Neither Nora and Sophie nor the rest of the characters are perfect. They are very complicated characters with baggage and old hurts still raw. We also see the struggles of finally coming in terms with who they are and yearning to be with the one person you always wanted and loved but couldn’t.

I enjoyed seeing Nora and Sophie finally come together, be honest, more open and finally committing to each other. It took them quite a lot of time to get there, with their stubbornness, their fights, family and ‘loved ones’ making it more difficult but they are finally happy and completely in love. I also enjoyed seeing/hearing young Nora and Sophie together, they were adorable. I was happy that Sophie finally

Quibbles (cause when don’t I have them): There are some pacing issues and the last few chapters of the book felt pretty rushed to me. Wasn’t a big fan of the language especially the terrorist comment towards her Alima, just cause she’s muslim? and some other instances. I also felt they were having the same argument over and over again.

Anyone looking for character driven romance who likes their romance to be a bit more messy and complicated along with the its always been you aspect would enjoy this one!

Also I do hope that Alima finds her HEA with someone deserving of her love. And that Charlie loses his election in this fictiony world.

If I'm totally honest, I did not realise this was a Mills and Boons until I started reading it. It was quite fun but maybe just not what I was expecting.
I did enjoy the idea of Persuasion set in Texas with a lesbian couple but something kept pulling me out of the story for some reason. Maybe I'm too much of an Austen fan, because the relationship between Nora and Sophie across time was moving. I'm so sorry that it just wasn't quite my cup of tea. I think I'm probably not the target reader.

4.5 stars

This is a wonderful story of Nora and Sophie who secretly fell in love as teenagers, were caught together and separated for 18 years.
It is a story of love against all odds, of friendship and of defeating the haters.
It is wonderful to read a lesbian love story where the characters are in their 30s. It gave the story real depth and so much meaning to their love story.
Nora and Sophie are both incredible characters. Nora is fierce and unapologetic about who she is. She was an absolute gem of a joint lead character. I loved her background being in the army and her journey to the present day. She held so much emotion and it was so great to see her character change.
Sophie is kind and yet very broken. She has lied about who she is for 18 years and married the father of her child. Sophie's story was my favourite. From her relationship with her daughter to her alcoholism as a way to cope. I wanted the best for her, she deserved every happiness despite her mistakes.

The writing is beautiful and the storyline simple and very character driven. It was so emotional and really made me feel. I adored it and highly recommend this beautiful love story.

Please note that I was gifted this book in exchange for an honest review.

It looks like the release date has been pushed back to 29th October.

3.5 STARS

The story of Nora and Sophie is more than just a romance - it explores friendship, family, loyalty, and acceptance with the backdrop of a small, conservative southern town.

I absolutely loved the first half of this book. Getting to know the characters and the background of their story was addicting. I was so excited to see where it would go and honestly thought this would be my first 5 star read in awhile. However, the second half fell a bit flat for me and I felt that there were some loose ends that didn't get tied up. I beginning to think my expectations in the realm of character development are just too high!

Thank you to Mills & Boon for providing me with an e-arc via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review!

The Secret of You and Me is the story of Nora Noakes and Sophie Russell. Nora, ex army, returns home to Texas from DC after her father dies. Coming home for his funeral is the first time she has returned to her home town since getting kicked out as a teenager. She has to navigate the many weird, uncomfortable and awkward relationships that she had left behind, and she wants to leave town as soon as possible. However, circumstances outside of her control trap her there. Sophie, her ex best friend, never left the town, and is now married to Charlie, Nora's ex boyfriend, and has a teenage daughter. It's impossible for them to avoid seeing each other again. Nora returning home rekindles old friendships and flames, but might they be better off left alone?

The book switches between Nora's point of view and Sophie's point of view. I liked the balance of getting both sides of the story. The tension between Nora and Sophie, with all of their shared history, is just so painfully good. And the Nora - Sophie - Charlie triangle is so complicated, full of secrets and lies. Throughout the whole book I was on the edge of my seat trying to figure out the truth. The tangled web of broken down relationships simply oozes regret and nostalgia. This book is about grudges, grief, reconciliation, love and loss, and is packed full of messy, complex emotions.

I found this book really easy to read. I was hooked by the secrets, and trying to figure out the truth. I loved the characters. The main characters are brilliant, complicated, flawed people, and there is also a whole cast of interesting side characters. Everything feels real. Real people with real lives. There's plenty of brilliant, catty, snarky dialogue, but also some really emotional, heartwrenching moments as well. The book deals well with mental illness. It touches on both PTSD and alcoholism, and I felt like both were portrayed well. Nora's stint in the army wasn't glorified, either. Prejudice and religion feature heavily as well. Nora and Sophie's story is very much defined by the oppressive place they grew up in, and the homophobia that they both experienced and internalised. This story is about overcoming the past, and moving on, or moving forward. Is it even possible to right old wrongs?

The Secret of Me and You is an intense book, and it really made me feel a whole raft of emotions. I loved it. It made me think a little bit of Dark Places and Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn, and Big Little Lies by Lianne Moriarty, although the drama is much more subtle. I highly recommend this book if you like slow burn romance, complex and messy relationships, and plenty of secrets and lies.

This is a story of childhood friends reunited after many years of scandal because they were two girls in love in a conservative part of Texas. Overall, it was a decent story but could have been shorter.

Sophie and Nora were best friends all throughout town. They live in a small conservative town in Texas so when they start to develop feelings for each other things start to get complicated. Nora is forced to leave town, the girls fall out and don't end up speaking for 18 years. However, Nora's father passes away which sees her come back to town. Sophie and Nora both have never lost feelings for each other but Sophie is now married and has a child. Can they rekindle their romance or are they really destined not to be?

I really enjoyed this. The relationship between Sophie and Nora felt really genuine and the small town element made the whole scenario more believable. The side stories for each of the characters were also added to story. This felt like a classic romcom. I feel like the LGBT romance was represented really well.

I will definitely be reading more from this author.

Thank you to Netgalley and Mills & Boon for providing me a copy to read.

Although this is a well written book it wasn't really for me. I know that plenty of people will disagree with me and find the subject to their liking. This covers deep emotions and lives, the characters seem real, I am just so sorry that I didn't enjoy it. Please don't just take my word for it, try this for yourself and look forward to reading it. I am only giving this 4 stars as I feel it would be unfair to give it any less , my loss could be your gain.

I did quite enjoy this book, I'm rounding up to a 4 star, but really I'd give it a 3.5. There were a lot of different things approached with sexuality, cheating, homophobia, family relationships and others. However, I was left feeling like I wanted more depth from it, particularly at the end, regarding Nora's father and her possible change of feelings regarding him. I think it could have done with being a little longer and exploring a few things in more depth. I also don't think that Nora and Sophie's renewed relationship seemed that convincing. They kept going in circles and there was a lot of nostalgia, rather than current connection. I was quite surprised when she chose Sophie too, that she would upend everything over such a shaky, unestablished relationship.
I did find myself having to check back whose perspective the chapters were told from a fair few times, as it wasn't obvious from the writing style which character was which.
My favourite part of the book was the party that was supposed to be for four, that ended up being rather more. The interactions between so many different characters were interesting and amusing.

Review also posted to Goodreads, but wouldn't work using the tick box below.

I requested this book as the cover is absolutely stunning and because I want to support LGBT stories in adult fiction, as our stories seem few and far between in adult fiction.
I enjoyed this book, but it was a lot heavier than I was expecting. Lenhardt deals with many topics such as grief, alcoholism, homophobia, PTSD and many more. This gave the novel more depth than I was expecting from it, and I thought that was a pleasant surprise. Neither of the main characters were particularly likeable, but the older I get, the more I realise that's okay. I'd rather read about real characters, damaged and broken characters, than cookie cutter perfect characters. Both Nora and Sophie are incredibly damaged and have a lot on their plate, both from the past and the present, but I thought the exploration of all their flaws was pretty well done.
I will say it felt as if for a while we were going in circles in Nora and Sophie's relationship. They would often end up fighting about the same thing they had been fighting about before, but that does show how problems aren't instantly solved, and how you often can be quite unaware of how deeply these flaws or values are ingrained in you.
I would absolutely recommend this if you love complicated romance stories, and more hard hitting romance stories.

The Secret of You and Me felt a lot like a book of two separate stories. One is the story of two women working through their fallout from eighteen years previously, and sorting their current lives out (to an extent). The other is of their second chance romance. The first worked more for me than the second.

If you’ve read any of my reviews, you’ll know how much I struggle with finding adult sapphic romances that I enjoy. And I really thought I had something here. I was liking the writing, I was (mostly) liking the way the plot was going. It looked like I was onto a win.

Well more fool me.

It’s not that this book suddenly turned awful. It was still a good book throughout. It’s just that certain things I was not enjoying got too much by the end and, yeah, the characters had some pretty shitty ideas at some points.

I’ll take this somewhat chronologically/in the order of the notes I made. First up, is that one of the main characters is ex-military. I don’t mean in and of itself that was a bad thing (necessarily), but I did feel as though it leant a little on the side of glorification of the military, or at the very least, no judgement on it. Which, okay, this is a US book and a US novelist, so that’s kind of to be expected. Doesn’t mean I had to like it.

But I tried to put that aside, or at least not let it affect how I read the book so much (and really, the whole thank you for your service crap dropped off within the first few chapters so it was easier). And then we came to the next bit. Everyone in this book is cheating. Okay, so not everyone. Emmadean is not. But that’s a single character of the ones who have most page time. I guess it makes it easier for your relationship between a married woman and a single woman to be okay when the married woman’s husband is already cheating. God but it got tiring though. Because the single woman is also in a relationship with another married woman. Genuinely I felt like I was following some kind of soap opera. Real housewives of wherever this book was set.

This took me up until the halfway mark, at which point I was still thinking I might like this book. And then the relationship between Nora and Sophie started.

Both of these characters had a sort of pattern. At the start, they ostensibly forgave each other, or said, let bygones be bygones. But throughout the book, they oscillated between being genuinely friendly again, and snapping at each other, and particularly snapping about past behaviours and so on. Which does not seem very forgiving to me. But okay, fine, I thought. Maybe they just need to work on the forgiveness part. Maybe there’s more hurt there than either of them expected. Except the pattern goes on until all but the end of the book, and it got a little hard to root for them together when, to my mind, they clearly weren’t good for one another.

And then, the kicker. Sophie’s husband figures something out but Nora tells him it’s all on her part and that Sophie rejected her. Charlie (the husband) then confronts Sophie about it, who blows up Nora’s lie and tells him everything. But in the meantime, she is unable to meet with Nora, who was expecting her. So Nora gets pissed (instead of, you know, wondering whether Sophie is okay) and basically claims like she did Sophie this huge favour by not outing her to her homophobic husband. Wow, thanks Nora! In a town you know is massively homophobic (more on that in a sec), you have so magnanimously not outed someone! She claims this lie is not only her being magnanimous, but also putting Sophie before herself. And, while she gets called out for actually being selfish in this situation, no one says to her that even thinking about outing someone like this is shitty, that choosing to out someone in a situation where they would be endangered is enormously so.

And this is when I really stopped rooting for this romance.

I mentioned how the town was homophobic briefly. I don’t have anything against showing homophobia and showing gay folks overcoming homophobia, per se. But the homophobia in this book was so constant it became genuinely exhausting. There was very little respite from it. If it wasn’t the casual and overt homophobia of the side characters, it was the main characters discussing it and having to deal with the aftermath of it. In the end, it just didn’t feel very sensitively handled, to be honest.

And all that meant that this book went from one that I thought I might have liked, to yet another that disappointed me.

Not my cup of tea, I did try to read this but none of the characters resonated in any way with me, didn't feel invested in the outcome so although fairly well written just not for me.

I'm not sure what Texas was like 20 years ago, but I know what the Christian countryside communities of Scotland was like and I can definitely empathise with the girls in this story. I too moved away to a different city to grow. Not that I had a love to go home to - but this story hit chords with me and I thank Melissa for that. Coming out as a teenager, being forced out or coming out as an adult - as Nora said, every one has a different story but we aren't alone. I think that is such an important message.

I will always say that you never know what goes on behind closed doors (I'm also a child of a divorce I didn't know was coming) and the story of Nora'ss family drew me in and made me want to hug them all until they no longer hurt from 20 year old aches.

There is so much I could say, but I won't spoil it for you - instead, I'll simply urge you to pick this book up and devour it like I did.

A sweet story, full of emotions and engrossing.
I loved the characters, rooted for them, and the plot kept me hooked.
It's well written and the characters are fleshed out.
I strongly recommend it.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

Sophie is a closeted lesbian and Nora is bisexual, they fell in love in high school and were torn apart by prejudice. Nora returns to the small town they were ride in and where Sophie still lives for her father's funeral, she is reunited with Sophie and this is where this book starts. The book outlines quite clearly how difficult it is to be LGBT in small town Texas and the complications that ensue when you can't be who you are. The chapters go back and forth between Nora's voice and Sophie's voice, which was occasionally confusing when there was internal and external dialogue wasn't signposted clearly enough and I found myself flitting back to the start of the chapter to see who was thinking and who was speaking. Also for a book about a romance between two women there is a lot of graphic heterosexual sex. The characters are well written and believable, and there is a lovely mother daughter relationship between Sophie and Logan.

The relationship newt was both the characters was written well. Sophie and Nora instant attraction is visual. I was expecting a different ending, however you didn’t see the twist and turns within the story.

Melissa Lenhardt has a wonderful free flowing writing style that made this book so easy to read and kept me turning the pages.
In their teens Nora and Sophie were best friends but something happens to split them apart which forces Nora to leave her hometown and everyone behind. When her father dies Nora returns home for his funeral and old passions are rekindled leaving Sophie to decide whether she should choose to change her life forever. Will Nora leave again or can she convinced to stay and erase the painful memories of the past? A beautifully and sensitively written love story.

A typical love story from Mills & Boon, or would be if the lovers were not of the same gender. Being British, I did not always get some of the American references (to food etc) .I do however appreciate that Texas is quite conservative and the religious aspect of the town in which the story is based. The lesbian relationships made this an interesting read and the response of the community about the relationships in the book was fairly well explored and fairly believeable.
As so often in books, and life, there seemed to be a fear of what people would think and communication problems about feelings and important issues which predictably went better than expected once brought into the open. I`m still asking myself whether attitudes to homosexuality were so biased and old-fashioned in 1995 ? I would have thought not, but I was not in the American deep south, so I can't offer an opinion about that.

This story was light reading on the whole, despite the couples problems, I normally prefer something more literary. I would read more from this author, but need something with more to it for my next read

Thankyou to Net galley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review

A lovely story of love, loss, friendships and family.

I really enjoyed this book, I really don’t want to spoil it for everyone by saying too much, other than you must read this!
If this isn’t normally your type of genre, give it a chance.
I love the way the author deals with what can be sensitive issues. The characters and locations in the book are described really well and you feel like you are there and get to know all the characters. As the story develops you learn more about why certain characters behave in certain ways and you fall in love with them even more.
I loved all the characters in this (well most of them!) and felt this could be a real life story. I loved their interactions with each other making it feel all the more real.
I loved that although some bits may be a little predictable, the ending wasn’t (but maybe the way I hoped it would be!)

A lovely tale that will stay with you, even after you finish the last page.


Thank you to Netgallery, the publishers and most importantly the author, for the chance to read this book, in exchange for an honest review.

I don't know how to express my feelings about this book without leaving accidental spoilers, so this is very brief for how much a I loved this story.

I would definitely read other books by this author and would 100% recommend this book to others. Such a wonderful story.