An Unexpected Kind of Love (When Snow Falls #1) by Hayden Stone

This is a Notting Hill fanfic and I LOVE Notting Hill so I should have loved this book. I did not love this book. In fact I kind of hated this book!!

My biggest issue with this was Aubrey, he was just a very unlikable MMC. I think he is supposed to come across as a cute curmudgeon but it didn’t land for me, he just came across as an asshole and I don’t understand how he has any friends and I really can’t understand how his mother signed the shop over to him, because he was just so, so, so bad at running a business and was too much of an idiot to ask for help or make any kind of strides towards being better at it!

The one thing I will agree with Aubrey on is him not deserving someone like Blake, he really didn’t deserve Blake! Well the Blake we got for 90% of the book, not the Blake who was naive enough to think that he could be in the movie business and not expect paparazzi in the UK of all places, not to have an interest in you and your private life. How he behaved after The Daily Fail outed his and Aubrey’s relationship just did not match the laid back and kind man we got for most of this book. It made no sense, and actually that happened a lot with this. Lots of things made no sense and things would escalate so quickly that it felt like whiplash!

Like the BJ in the trailer, I thought I’d somehow skipped a chapter or something! How does it go from mistakenly entering the wrong person’s trailer to going down on them in like less than a page?

The whole book was a bit like that, it would DRAG on about things that just were not important, like never shutting up about the heatwave in London, and then practically skip over things that were kind of important.

There was also no context for lots of things. Like the guitar? It was Aubrey’s dad’s guitar and they randomly took it on their weekend getaway and Aubrey left it behind when he overreacted and took a train back to London, all this just so Blake could end up serenading Aubrey in Euston Station, with an electric guitar? It was honestly just cringe AF!

And, Aubrey has a cat that he barely mentions and wasn’t mentioned when Blake came to visit or in the epilogue? What happened to the cat? I need to know about the cat!

Oh and don’t get me started on the ex drama, it was eyeroll worthy!!! I also have a lot of feelings about Aubrey hightailing it to New York, it was dumb and also really disrespectful of Blake’s boundaries, he clearly told Aubrey what he needed (even if it was out of character) and then Aubrey decided to grand gesture him? It was so selfish!

I could go on and on about all the things I didn’t like about this, I hung on because I loved the premise and I kept hoping it would get better. It never did!

I can safely say that I won’t be continuing on with this series.

Synopsis:

Bookstore owner Aubrey Barnes likes his quiet, orderly London life, thank you very much. His shop may be struggling, his only employee is a menace, and his plumbing is one creaky pipe away from disaster, but he can handle it. Maybe. He cannot, however, handle the film company that’s thrown his Soho street into chaos.

And he definitely can’t handle the charismatic American actor Blake Sinclair.

Which is why he’s extremely reluctant to lease out his shop as a set for Blake’s film, but it’s his one opportunity to save his business. Now he can’t get away from the distractingly hot actor.

Then Aubrey finds himself alone with Blake in a trailer, and what happens next turns London’s heat wave into an inferno that leaves him breathless.

Aubrey is not cut out for the high-profile life of dating a celebrity, especially an American actor who’s not even out yet. Good thing their tryst is absolutely not going anywhere.

Of course, when you expect nothing, that’s exactly when it starts to mean everything.