Review: Take a Hint, Dani Brown by Talia Hibbert

Take a Hint, Dani Brown is the rom-com follow up to Get a Life, Chloe Brown. We follow Danika Brown and Zafir Ansari in a romance that has fake dating, trauma recovery, friends to lovers, and a lot of wonderful family dynamics.

Talia Hibbert crafts wonderful complete characters that have strong and realistic personalities. Her characters all seem so separate from each other and, in many ways, like people I actually have known. Dani is a high-strung, spiritual, work-focused Ph.D. candidate who wants to have her emotional life as controlled as possible so that she can, and Zafir, the former d-list rugby player, turned security guard with anxiety and past trauma.

I absolutely loved their individual emotional arcs, the way they interconnect was obviously wonderful, but I really enjoyed each character on their own as well. It is a romance; you want the two to end up together, but more than that, Hibbert is really able to make you want them to make the choice that leads them to happiness even if it isn't the other person.

The use of the fake dating trope in this book is quite fun. Hibert manages to do small subversions of the fake dating structure while still keeping the fun and tension of the trope very much alive. My only gripe with the trope was that the justification didn't work for me. The pair has to pretend to date to capitalize on a viral moment set up at the beginning of the book. The way social media is presented in this book just didn't ring true to me; it seemed far fetched that so many people on campus would care and that this assumption would have the weight to carry this much attention towards two pretty normal folks. I got over this because I liked so much else about the book, but I didn't love the justification even if I did like the execution afterward!

I really loved the moments we got to spend with Chloe and Red; Hibbert did an excellent balance of this book really being Dani and Zafir's story while still letting us peek into what is happening since we left the story of Get a Life, Chloe Brown. It also served to make me very excited to read about Eve in Act Your Age, Eve Brown, which is out in March of 2021!

I gave this book 4 stars on Goodreads and The StoryGraph. I would certainly recommend this book to anyone who loves a rom-com (with the note that it is very much adult), to people who want to read about characters in their mid to late 20's, and to folks that like a well-developed character arc for everyone involved in a romance focused book!