Overall Grade: 4.5 ⭐️
Tropes: friends to lovers; second chance romance; small town romance; forced proximity/one bed trope; childhood friends
“You would take us places and I’d get us home safe. None of it ever felt like a burden. It just felt like…us.”
A week later and Roxie Noir’s The Two Week Roommate still resides in my head. Like some of her contemporaries, Noir has taken the space to add depth to the romance genre. How you might say? In her newest book, her thematic choices elevate the simplicity of the romance genre. With her newest book, Noir highlights the complexity of relationships, underscoring the fraught nature of her main characters’s journey. The influence of Gideon’s upbringing tears them apart in their youth and leaves Gideon with a hole in his heart, only filled when he reconnects with Andi. His penance and guilt challenge Andi to forgive him for choices made in the inexperience of his youth. Maturity, the personal journeys of his siblings, and military service have opened his world and his mind, and his need to let go of his past to find his future with Andi is the most compelling part of their story. Andi’s willingness to help him process the final bits of his guilt while falling in love with him adds heart to this book. I lost myself in The Two Week Roommate. Roxie Noir doesn’t need to add much tension to Gideon and Andi’s relationship, given that their environment is stressful enough. Instead, acceptance is the ultimate message, backed up by keeping Gideon and Andi together even through difficult times. That’s the promise of this newest book from Roxie Noir. She has drawn a socially responsible and beautiful romance between Andi and Gideon that steals a bit of your heart and leaves you questioning your perceptions of others.
In love and romance,
Professor A
Professor Romance 