Tessa Bailey is originally from Carlsbad, California. The day after high school graduation, she packed her yearbook, ripped jeans, and laptop and drove cross-country to New York City in under four days. Her most valuable life experiences were learned thereafter while waitressing at K-Dees, a Manhattan pub owned by her uncle. Inside those four walls, she met her husband and her best friend and discovered the magic of classic rock, and she managed to put herself through Kingsborough Community College and the English program at Pace University at the same time. Several stunted attempts to enter the workforce as a journalist followed, but romance writing continued to demand her attention. She now lives in Long Island, New York, with her husband and daughter. Although she is severely sleep-deprived, she is incredibly happy to be living her dream of writing about people falling in love. Catch her on TikTok at @authortessabailey or check out tessabailey.com for a complete list of books. You can find more of my reviews of Tessa's works here.
Rosie and Dominic Vega are the perfect couple: high school sweethearts, best friends, madly in love. Well, they used to be anyway. Now Rosie's luck 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 to be found. When her girlfriends encourage Rosie to demand more out of life and pursue her dream of opening a restaurant, she decides to demand more out of love, too. Three words: marriage boot camp. Never in a million years did Rosie believe her stoic, too-manly-to-emote husband would actually agree to a relationship rehab with a weed-smoking hippie. Dom talking about feelings? Sitting on pillows? Communing with nature? Learning love languages? Nope. But to her surprise, he's all in, and it forces her to admit her own role in their cracked foundation. As they complete one ridiculous—yet surprisingly helpful–assignment after another, their remodeled relationship gets stronger than ever. Except just as they're getting back on track, Rosie discovers Dom has a secret . . . and it could demolish everything.
I don't usually read second-chance romance, or high school sweetheart romance, or saving a marriage romance, so Love Her or Lose Her was really out of my wheelhouse for me, but I found that these tropes were really more interesting to me than I had assumed. Rosie and Dominic, after falling in love in high school, now need marriage counseling as a last-ditch effort to save their failing marriage. It's out of their comfort zone for both of them, but they both want to save what they had while moving forward towards their future. I think Bailey combined this set of tropes well and believably in order to give context to their story.
However, I felt like a lot was missing in order to make this a more satisfying read. For example, what did Dominic experience and see overseas that makes it difficult for him to be who he used to be with Rosie? This gets touched on, but never explored in their therapy sessions or afterwards. Why did Rosie feel the need to give up and stop caring for Dominic over the years? We get the sort of come-to-Jesus moment that she does (and that could have been more emotional, too), but I almost wanted to see more of Rosie's despair in the moment she comes to that realization and reflects on her past mistakes. I feel like a lot of these emotions are touched on, but not explored to their full potential in favor of exploring their physical intimacy.
Finally, I felt like the resolution was too quick, and that the third-act "break-up" was unnecessary and distracting. While I see that Dominic definitely had to reveal the house to Rosie, I felt like it could have been done earlier, for a more betraying and heartbreaking effect. The house was also revealed, and then the resolution wrapped up in the final two chapters, which felt rushed and reversed and then re-reversed the progress the two had made as a couple throughout the whole book. This was rather frustrating as a reader, too, because I didn't feel like they were given the time to truly recover from the final reveal. All-in-all, I just found the ending to be too rushed, and didn't do the potential of the tropes and characters justice.
The final book in the series follows Bethany and Wes, the two characters in Love Her or Lose Her that stole the spotlight in every scene they were in. I have high hopes, but am keeping those close. Until they, you can find Tessa Bailey on TikTok at @authortessabailey or check out tessabailey.com for a complete list of books. You can find more of my reviews of Tessa's works here.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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