seriously romantic: american sweethearts by adriana herrera

the dreamers series comes to a close with american sweethearts, and it's long-time, on-and-off again lovers, priscilla and juan pablo getting all the attention now. so you all know how i feel about second-chance romances, but it's not that i hate them all. it's just that there are so many done wrong. adriana herrera gets it right. yeah, some of their past is there, but it never overwhelms what happens in the here and now, and it's not that the characters make the same mistakes with a miraculously different outcome. it's that they put the work in to make it work.

the last time they broke up, juanpa realized he needed to make some changes. his very real concerns and not unreasonable anxieties were expressing themselves as anger and judgment and kept pushing away the one person in his life that he wants to keep close.

but for her part priscilla is holding on to her pride a bit too hard, life changes and sometimes the things we thought we wanted most aren't actually what we want in the end.

most of the conflict has to do with priscilla's work as a police officer. it's something she's clearly not happy with, and she's found a passion outside of her work at the precinct. but because she stuck to her pact with juanpa to join the police academy and he didn't, she feels like it's been a point of contention for so long between them, she doesn't know how to let it go without feeling like she's admitting she did something wrong.

and honestly, that speaks to me, because *no one* likes to be wrong. and it's more complex than that, because she wasn't wrong when she made the choices she did, and juanpa wasn't wrong to have made the choices he did. they were young and wanted different things and didn't talk to each other openly.

but juanpa has put a lot of work into being open and priscilla has to figure out how to match him and trust that the work he has put in is here to stay. because aside from their communication problems, they are clearly on the same wavelength everywhere else. especially the bedroom. where they are simply hot, hot, hot.

**american sweethearts will publish on march 30, 2020. i received an advance reader copy courtesy of netgalley/carina press in exchange for my honest review.