I found Like Lovers Do, which is the second book in the Girls’ Trip series, to be frustrating. I like the focus on friendship and work/life balance in this series, but wow, did this book make me want to plead, “GET SOME THERAPY!” I admired many things about the characters but their inability to manage relationships made me want to scream, as did the evil ex-girlfriend character.

This series is about a group of Black friends, all of whom are high-achieving professionals in their respective fields. This book focuses on one of these women, Dr. Nicole Allen (Nic). Nic is about to finish a residency in orthopedic surgery. She was raised by a single mom who sacrificed all her own ambitions to support a husband who then skipped out on the family when Nic was a child. Nic has no interest in romance, believing that a serious romantic relationship would inevitably force her to make the same choices as her mom.

At the start of the book, Nic has rented a basement apartment from Ben for three years and they have become close friends. Ben was born to extremely wealthy parents who devoted their lives to their careers and ignored him. His dream is to marry someone who will make family life a priority and will center their lives around their children. He intentionally keeps his own business small so that his work doesn’t eclipse his life, ignoring the option of hiring more people to let the business expand without eating up all his time.

So, basically, both people think there is only one possible outcome of romance: love a man and you will have to give up your career, and love a woman who is into her career and you have to give up family. This conflict could have been compelling if it were based in real conversations about what quality parenting and work/life balance might look like to each of them. Instead they just run around repeating refrains of, “I hate love because of my parents” and “Oh yeah, well, I hate doctors because of MY parents.” It was frustrating to see such a potentially compelling and important conflict reduced to assumptions based on unresolved childhood issues.

Anyway, it turns out that Ben has an obnoxious ex named Tinsley who is crashing a gathering of Ben’s friends at Martha’s Vineyard. Nic agrees to be Ben’s pretend girlfriend. It takes about five seconds for them to start making out because of mutual pants feelings and they realize that their friendship has been love along, but after spending three years of friendship with nary an argument, they are now arguing about whether they can have a long term relationship.

You might like this book if you like:

• Vicariously living the dream (luxury and scenery on Martha’s Vineyard)
• Fake dating tropes
• Found family
• Friends-to-lovers tropes

This book unfortunately contains one of my LEAST favorite tropes, that of the conniving, manipulative, hostile ex-girlfriend, and does nothing to flesh out the character. Tinsley is incredibly over-the-top in her attempts to manipulate Ben and insult Nic, and her motive never makes sense –Tinsley is rich, blonde, beautiful and thin (also, we are told, “polished”), so I’m pretty sure there are fish in the sea for her other than Ben. There’s no nuance with her character or behavior. No one likes her or wants her around, and because she doesn’t express any sadness about that, there’s no room for the reader to feel sorry for Tinsley. She has no personality beyond wanting Ben and hating Nic and being a racist snob. She’s a caricature evil ex.

This has been an odd review to write because the longer I worked on it the angrier I got. Work/Life/Parenting balance is HARD, people. It’s hard if you choose to have one parent stay home. It’s hard if both parents work long hours with high career ambitions. Maybe I’m extra touchy about this because during the pandemic, it seems to me to be next to impossible: I have one teen and I’m a work-from-home parent and I’m pulling out my hair, and how much more difficult has this been for everyone else? But even in a pandemic-free world, there are no right answers to what a family should look like and there aren’t any easy answers either. If two people are ambitious about their careers, and want to have kids, then they will have some tough conversations ahead. I don’t mean to suggest that ambitious, career-focused people can’t be good parents, because of course they can. I’m just saying that the struggle, as they say, is real because children are time consuming (ask me how I know).

So to have the conflict boiled down to Nic deciding that ANY serious romantic relationship would inevitably be the end of her career solely because that’s the choice her mother made was really frustrating. And to have that same conflict boiled down to Ben presuming that parents with demanding jobs can’t be good parents because his parents were garbage people is just as infuriating. It’s a raw nerve for me right now, and in general.

This book is very descriptive: the dreamy vacations are dreamy, the sex is hot, and many of the issues that are present deserve exploration. However, Tinsley is never humanized, and the main conflict becomes contrived by taking a serious issue that could be worked through with intention, and reduces it to an emotional mess between two people who recite the conflict without any nuance behind their convictions. I wanted both of them to find some therapy to help them past those issues. I enjoyed a lot of the book (mainly, the parts in which Ben and Nic just hung out without drama). However, the evil-ex trope and the mis-handling of the conflict was a bummer that left me feeling frustrated at the end of the story.