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Rating: 3.9 ��(78%)

“It’s incredible how many different people one body can hold. We all walk around with a thousand strangers inside us, slumbering quietly until someone else wakes them up.��

I love J. T. Geissinger—she’s one of my favourite authors and all her new releases are marked in my calendar so I can read them as soon as they’re released. I even kept on refreshing yesterday at 12:00 AM and 12:02, 12:09, seeing if it was out yet, but alas, I had to wait until the morning (which is probably for the best since I would read it all in a few hours and this girl needs her sleep 😴).

When I read the blurb for Pen Pal months ago in her newsletter, I was soo excited. I can always count on Geissinger to deliver on her romances and this one sounded like it would be *chef’s kiss*.

Flash forward to now, I luckily saw an ARC review warning everyone that the book is not what we were all probably expecting and to pretty much go in with 0 expectations. And most importantly, that the book is not a romance . And girl, they were right. I think it may be even better to NOT read the blurb before you start it and go in blind—especially if you’ve read a lot of dark romances, because we all know what we were expecting and this was not it LOL. It’s definitely a thriller and doesn’t have a standard HEA. The pacing was great and the premise was very interesting, but I was on alert the whole time because I knew some great big twist was coming Perfect Strangers PTSD cough.

I thought Kayla and the MC were cute and had great chemistry, except I’m not too fond with all the Master/Sir dom/little bunny stuff that Geissinger likes to include in her fics now, but whatever, I’ll let it slide 🤷‍♀��. Also, Kayla (the FMC) was way too content with letting all the crazy stuff happening to her go on without calling THE POLICE or getting checked out at the nearest medical institution. She attributed it to fear of being misdiagnosed, and yes, while that does happen, hospitals can still diagnose you correctly and surely getting this all figured out is better than just continuing life wondering whether you’re going crazy? 🙄

Overall, the plot is a little messy and confusing (I had to read the reveal twice to fully get what was happening) but I still found it pretty good because I was able to speed through it, and there were a lot of twists and turns to keep this easily-distracted girl occupied. I do wish that J.T. Geissinger will now write the book that we were all expecting with this blurb—which is the mafia, pen pal romance of our dreams. 😂😂 She went in a totally different direction from what was marketed about this book, and while that’s fine, I demand my sexy hot mystery mafia man from prison named Dante who writes sexy romantic letters to the heroine.


Review: 2/2/2022: The summary for this from J.T. Geissinger's newsletter sounds absolutely delicious.
Can't wait for this!