The Girl Who Cried Poetry

I’m back with a review of one of the juiciest novels I’ve read this month.

I started the year with a sort of reading slump, and while I can’t say it’s been going great because I can still go a week without reading anything, I think I can give myself credit, and say I’m enjoying what I read and upping my reading count at the same time.

And really, what’s the best way to enjoy reading and increase your reading progress if not with a standalone romance series that just happens to be written by an author who knows their stuff?

I present to you: The Hot and Hammered series by Tessa Bailey!

There are three books in the series and below are the names and book covers of each of them in the right order:



Fix Her Up

Love Her or Lose Her

Tools of Engagement

Before we get started, let’s go with a short synopsis of the three books, so you can have an idea about them.

Fix Her Up: Georgette Castle’s family runs the best home renovation business in town, but she picked balloons instead of blueprints, and they haven’t taken her seriously since. Frankly, she’s over it. Georgie loves planning children’s birthday parties and making people laugh, just not at her own expense. She’s determined to fix herself up into a Woman of the World… whatever that means.

Love Her or Lose Her: Rosie and Dominic Vega are the perfect high school sweethearts, best friends, madly in love. Well, they used to be anyway. Now Rosie’s lucky to get a caveman grunt from the ex-soldier every time she walks in the door. Dom is faithful and a great provider, but the man she fell in love with ten years ago is nowhere.

Tools of Engagement: Hair, makeup, clothing, decor… everything in Bethany Castle’s world is organized, planned, and styled to perfection. Which is why the homes she designs for her family’s real estate business are the most coveted in town. The only thing not perfect? Her track record with men. She’s on a dating hiatus and after helping her friends achieve their dreams.

Now, where are we?

I don’t think I can fit in my whole review and analysis about this series in one blog post, because honestly, it got me thinking in a lot of ways and you know the book is damn good when you’ve got theories that you want to share with people, and yes, that’s why there’ll be other blog posts pertaining to these books.

Each book had me deep inside and when you combine everything, you realise that the world in the book is one that has been strategically plotted and it just makes sense.

For the first book and couple, Georgette and Travis, I’ll give it a 3/ 5. It wasn’t a bad book, tbh. The whole “girl falls in love with her brother’s best friend who is a player” thing might pose itself as a cliche, but it’s actually really nice. Perhaps, the fake relationship thing is something that wasn’t my vibe, so I didn’t enjoy it much, but I love how emotions were depicted in the novel. The both of them were so into each other.

You could see that Travis was so affected by Georgette’s presence in his life that the “She fell first, but he fell harder” trope went hard. But… I got disinterested with the smut. I thought it was too long, and I just wanted them to get over with the book already. The epic proposal was cute, though.

For Love Her or Lose Her, I could say I was very intrigued by the broken relationship trope. I don’t know why reading two people who had a bad relationship get together and sort it out looks like a great read, but heh, we all have our perks and from the details put out in the first book, I knew Rosie and Dominic’s relationship was something I wanted to explore and uncover. I wasn’t disappointed.

The book left me with so many thoughts and I hope to unpack them in a future blog post. In the beginning, I wondered why Rosie stayed in the marriage for so long. I mean, what do you mean that you and your husband haven’t talked to each other in the last five(or is it ten?) years? It’s mind-boggling, to be honest.

But here’s the twist: Their sex life was great. They didn’t talk to each other, but the sex? It was consistent and by reading the book, you could see that years did nothing to ruin the sexual attraction they had for each other.

I love the fact that Rosie took the first step by leaving the marriage. Honestly, I was like “go, girl” because there ain’t no way. Then, it hit Dominic like a hard punch that his marriage was falling apart and they both had to fix up.

Couples therapy did help with their unconventional therapist, Armie — who so happens to be my favourite side character btw— and things worked out fine in the end. I think my favourite part was exploring their love languages together. Real sweet.

It’s a 4/5 for me. It was great, but a lot of times, I just wanted to get all up in Dominic’s face because the “Alpha male” demeanour wasn’t appealing in the slightest, and I wanted the smut over with.

The last, but not the least(I’m serious, it’s actually my favorite!): Wes and Bethany! From the second book, I just had an inkling that their story was going to be a bomb and IT WAS! *fangirl screams*

I think I liked it so much because it was a match made in the deepest parts of hell that no one could expect and… in a good way! Wes, 23, who’s a cowboy and wears an actual cowboy hat and looks all strong and rough, and there’s Bethany, who just happens to be the big sister I want in my life. She’s 30, posh, has her life put together … Or so it appears. Who is our soft skin, sassy, tough, has it all together heroine behind closed doors?

Let me give a quick summary in my own words.

Wes gets a phone call from his half sister, who asks for a favour to come all the way to Port Jefferson and take care of her daughter. Wes is just 23 and all he’s ever known is riding the bulls and drinking beer and all of a sudden, he’s in charge of taking care of a five-year-old and trying to navigate his new-found life in Port Jefferson. Bethany is what everyone will call “Perfect.” She’s a natural-born leader, a successful interior decorator and even the orchestrator of a successful women’s club, the Just Us League. But now, she wants to get her hands dirty and do her own flip instead of staging, but her brother isn’t giving her the chance, so she breaks out from the family business to do her own.

Bethany might not like Wes’ guts, but she can’t deny the fact that she needs him, and he’s the only one who happens to see through the tough girl persona she has on. And Wes? He loves the thrill of arguing with Bethany and suddenly, he doesn’t only want to bed her, he wants to love her despite their obvious age gap.

The enemies to lovers trope was giving, the slow burn was executed just the way I love it and the way they both bonded with Wes’ niece, Laura? See, you just have to read it yourself to know that Wes and Bethany were made for each other.

For me, it’s a 5/5.

I still don’t get this thing with Romance novels where there’s a fall-out before the resolution. We don’t need it. We’re here for the delusion. Give it to us straight.

As much as I loved the series, each book had its own fallout towards the resolution that just wasn’t it. The worst of them all had to be Georgette and Travis’s. You could smell it from 10 chapters away.

I hope you enjoyed reading this review as much as I enjoyed writing it! Do this book blog a favour and share with your bookish friends if you enjoy the content I put out here. I’ll be sure to keep on doing the most, because if I don’t do it, who will?

Disclaimer: Just because I liked the book doesn’t mean it’s good, and just because I said this, doesn’t mean the book is necessarily bad. It’s 2024 and we all should have our tastes defined by now.


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