Parent Trap meets Bridgerton, and make it sapphic. Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend has a heckuva fun hook, and the story definitely lives up to the hype! It’s charming, heartwarming, and absolutely delightful.

It’s Beth’s first season, and she has just this one shot to snag a wealthy husband or else she and her newly-widowed mother, Lady Cordelia Demeroven, will be out on the streets. This is also Gwen’s fourth season; she’s pretty sure she’s destined for a ‘most seasons without a match’ medal, and mostly amuses herself at parties by challenging friends and cousins to ‘spot the heir and the spare’ games.

When Gwen rescues Beth from an over-eager old man, both young women realize they’d much rather hang out together than deal with all the tediousness and stress of the season’s endless social events. They also realize that their parents seem to be attracted to each other, and scheme to help them along towards their own happily ever after.

Beth and Gwen’s relationship is really sweet. Even more than the physical attraction and the fun sexytime scenes, their friendship and desire for each other’s happiness really shines through. These are characters who genuinely enjoy spending time together, and my favourite parts are when they’re just having fun hanging out together and laughing at silly things going on around them.

For me, though, the main highlight of the book isn’t the main romance, but rather the second-chance romance brewing between Beth’s mother, Lady Cordelia Demeroven, and Gwen’s father, Lord Dashiell Havenfort. When both were in their own seasons, they fell in love, but Lady Demeroven was in a similar situation as Beth, where she needed to marry rich to secure her family’s financial stability. Lord Havenfort was heartbroken, and even though he went on to marry Gwen’s mother, when his wife died, he never bothered finding a new one, and instead chose to remain a perpetual bachelor and lady charmer for the rest of his life.

Their meet-cute at the same ball where Beth and Gwen meet was just sparking with unresolved sexual tension, and their will they/won’t they dance running parallel to Beth and Gwen’s romance just stole the show for me. I absolutely felt for Lady Demeroven’s desire to reunite with Lord Havenfort yet also secure her daughter’s future with a wealthy match to another family. The man who eventually began courting Beth seems sweet enough, but his father is a total ass. Seeing through Beth’s eyes the parallels between this potential future father-in-law and her own abusive father is heartbreaking, especially when she notices how much her mom makes herself small to feed this man’s ego, just so she can secure Beth’s future. I love how Beth pushes her mom to consider how their happiness (Beth’s and her mom’s) is more important than financial security, but I also understand why her mom would be afraid to make that leap.

Lord Havenfort seems like a good man, and I sympathize for how much Lady Demeroven’s fears keep happiness away from both of them. A member of the House of Lords, he’s championing a bill to give women the right to divorce their husbands. This objectively makes him a hero, but on a more visceral level, it also makes him a personal knight in shining armour to Lady Demeroven and women like her, because if such a law had existed earlier, she may not have had to put up with an abusive marriage for so long.

Honestly, their romance just stole the show for me, and the big climactic moment between them just made my heart swell. I am so absolutely fantastically proud of Lady Demeroven, and so happy for them both.

I also really like how the novel explores the ways in which social conventions determine the options available to Beth and Gwen. It’s illegal for two women to marry, and most couples in their situation make do with being friends who visit each other’s estates and steal whatever moments they can for romantic encounters. Both Beth and Gwen struggle to come to terms with that restriction, yet as women, they couldn’t really have careers on their own, and so need husbands for financial stability. This is especially true for Beth who doesn’t have the security of Gwen’s father’s wealth.

The book highlights this theme with the two women servants who both work in the same household under different married surnames, but are actually a couple. Social snobbery works to their advantage, because most members of society don’t bother paying enough attention to the servants to even notice they’re romantically involved. One of them tells Gwen that this is the one time she’ll admit that Gwen’s wealth and social status puts her at a disadvantage, and I like how the story explores these kinds of nuances about privilege.

Overall, this is a fun, lighthearted, and feel-good book. The sequel, You’re the Problem, It’s You, featuring Beth and Gwen’s cousins, also seems like fun. Both cousins’ meet-cute at the end of Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend showed a lot of promise for their chemistry together.

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Thanks to Harper Collins Canada for an e-galley of this book in exchange for an honest review.