NB: This is a review for both this book, and the entire trilogy.

I adored Jodi McAlister’s Marry Me Juliet trilogy. This contemporary romance series lovingly satirizes the Australian version of The Bachelor while offering a lot of wish fulfillment for fans of reality dating shows. Each book includes at least one moment that I’ve always wanted to happen on The Bachelor—from two bisexuals who fall for each other instead of the lead, to having all the women on the show organize together to reject the Bachelor star. It offers plenty of backstage drama alongside humorous insights about The Bachelor franchise. I think reality tv romance readers will especially enjoy these books, but the first book in the series offers adorable forced proximity and sympathetic characters that could hook other romance fans.

In Here for the Right Reasons, Cece is a regular watcher of Marry Me Juliet, a Romeo and Juliet-themed dating show that she and her best friends love to dissect. Cece applies for the show on drunken lark with no intention of following through…until she loses her job and decides to use the show to become an influencer. This is a terrible idea because Cece knows even less about social media than I do. Unfortunately for her, she becomes a babbling mess when she sees a camera and is quickly cut the first night by the show’s first lead of color, a kindhearted Olympic athlete named Dylan.

Luckily for us readers, a pandemic lockdown forces Cece and the other rejected women to stay at the same sprawling fancy property for the rest of filming, causing endless opportunities for drama. The show’s manipulative producer, Murray, is working hard to tell a fairy tale romance between Dylan and his gorgeous Juliets in the hopes of convincing the network that racially diverse casting can work. Behind the scenes, Dylan and Cece are fast becoming lockdown besties…and maybe more. But are either of them willing to blow up the show and Dylan’s chance to make Marry Me Juliet less racist?

Cece and Dylan are the sweetest nincompoops who struggle to see that their growing feelings are reciprocated. I thought Cece’s reactions to the manufactured reality tv environment were pitch perfect and felt like exactly what would happen if an awkward person ended up on The Bachelor. She wonders aloud why the women are forced to walk down a slick wet driveway to meet Dylan, and then promptly slips and nearly takes out both of them.

Still, Cece isn’t completely unskilled. She’s a former foster kid who deploys her ability to survive annoying environments by ignoring the women angry that Dylan spends most of his free time with the weird girl from episode one. I devoured this book because I loved Cece’s resilience and Dylan’s nurturing but I couldn’t see how these two would resolve the tension between their commitments to the show and their relationship.

Each book in the series is set in the same season of Marry Me Juliet and retells the same timeline of events in a different way, filling in conversations and budding relationships that we’d missed in the previous stories. It’s hard to review the other two books without spoiling Here for the Right Reasons because the other couples are a big surprise revealed at the end of the book that precede it. So if you don’t want to be spoiled, stop reading now.
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Everybody good with your life choices?

Ok, let’s dig into Can I Steal You for a Second. This book follows two contestants who just ooze super sexy competency: Amanda, a White car mechanic still healing from a toxic queer breakup, and Dylan G, who’s Pasifika, and a nurse burnt out from the pandemic. Yes, Dylan has the same name as the male lead on the show. This was an amusing gender-neutral twist to The Bachelor’s habit of casting multiple Bens and Kelseys on the same season. I especially loved how the name overlap allowed Amanda to wail about falling for Dylan while the other contestants have no idea which Dylan she’s referring to.

I also loved that while Amanda has the more masculine-coded job, it’s Dylan G who is the protective badass during filming. Dylan G frequently steps in when the season’s villain, Lily, bosses other contestants around, giving Amanda a chance to swoon every time. These two had super strong sexual tension but I am sad to report these are cracked door romances at most. Since all the contestants are living together in bunk beds, the story had a classic lesbian boarding school vibe. However, I do wish the book had included Dylan G’s perspective, instead of making me read about her through Amanda.

By the time I read book 3, I was amazed by the creativity in the storylines and surprised that I never felt bored revisiting the same month-long time period. The third book, Not Here to Make Friends, takes that creativity to a new level, showing how seemingly hapless producer Murray was actually more observant than we thought about the romantic entanglements of Cece, Amanda and the Dylans. Yeah, he let the show go off the rails, but only because he was distracted by his pants feelings for Lily, the contestant everyone loved to hate.

Lily “Fireball” Ong is a polarizing character in the first two books. She’s loud, bossy, and not afraid to push women into swimming pools when they annoy her. She exclusively wears bright lipstick and brighter dresses, yelling at other women who dare to show up for a group date in the same hue. While Murray is scheming to push the other contestants together (or apart), Lily always seemed to be two steps ahead of him, snagging Romeo-Dylan’s attention and hogging screen time. I adored her from the moment she appears.

Lily is an amalgamation of The Bachelor’s most entertaining scene-stealers, like self-described princess, Erica Rose and Corinne Olympios of “my heart is gold, but my vagina is platinum” fame. Unlike most reality shows, the villains on The Bachelor are usually White women. Lily is Vietnamese Australian, and she knows that means the hate coming her way from viewers will be exponentially more intense. She is happy to sacrifice her reputation for more diversity on Marry Me Juliet, and plans to ride the wave of hate into social media stardom. The only person trying to protect Lily from herself is Murray.

To explain why means spoiling all three books.

Not Here to Make Friends pulls off one of the most compulsively readable villain redemption arcs I’ve read. Murray and Lily are unapologetically devious and revel in their ability to make people cry in service of great tv. The other characters don’t trust them since Amanda and Dylan G have to skirt around Murray’s manipulations, and Cece and Romeo-Dylan are befuddled by Lily’s unpredictability as she careens around set causing mayhem on camera while helping them sneak around behind the crew’s back. By the time I started the third book, I was dying to see if Lily and Murray could make sense as a couple.

Murray and Lily are the best kind of antiheroes. He’s cunning but usually for a good cause (aka taking down misogynists). She’s a chaos demon who loves pushing people’s buttons to make drama. Murray spends most of the third book falling apart from the stress of Lily’s stunts while Lily appears devastatingly calm, collected, and in emotional control. They are so similar and yet so different it’s really delicious to watch.

Lily’s point of view unfolds the mystery of why she decided to go on the show, and I just melted into a puddle of love after hearing everything she’s been through. This book combines enemies to lovers and friends to lovers, two of my least favorite tropes, and I loved it anyway! I appreciated that Lily and Murray have the same goal–entertaining reality tv with diverse representation–they just disagree on how to get there. Their partnership was really inspiring to read, even though they start and end the book as flawed workaholics who love scheming.

The Marry Me Juliet stories have very different tropes, but the themes are similar across all three books. There’s a lot of sneaking around to keep relationships secret, characters with a strong personal moral code, and healing from grief through found family. The characters in the books take the social impact of reality tv seriously and make it part of the stakes for all three couples, which I found refreshing and unusual among reality tv romances. At the same time, the stories were soapy, fun, and laced with biting social commentary. I desperately wish I could actually watch this most dramatic season of Marry Me Juliet yet on my tv screen.

Editor’s note: Here for the Right Reasons and Can I Steal You For a Second? are available digitally in the US. On June 4, 2024, Not Here to Make Friends will be released in print by Atria.

The Cleric Chih accompanies a beautiful young bride to her wedding to the aging ruler of a crumbling estate situated at the crossroads of dead empires. The bride’s party is welcomed with elaborate courtesies and extravagant banquets, but between the frightened servants and the cryptic warnings of the lord’s mad son, they quickly realize that something is haunting the shadowed halls.

As Chih and the bride-to-be explore empty rooms and desolate courtyards, they are drawn into the mystery of what became of Lord Guo’s previous wives and the dark history of Do Cao itself. But as the wedding night draws to its close, Chih will learn at their peril that not all monsters are to be found in the shadows; some monsters hide in plain sight.

Though all the novellas are standalone, I would recommend reading at least one or two earlier ones to get a feel for the world and more information on the background of Chih and Almost Brilliant.

Dear Nghi Vo,

A new Singing Hills novella with Cleric Chih! This time it’s got some weird goings on, a strange family, a mystery. But where is Almost Brilliant?

Cleric Chih, a story gatherer from the Singing Hills Monastery, is on the road, traveling with a young bride and her parents on her way to meet a man her parents want her to marry. Pham Nhung is very young, sweetly charming, and acts and is treated as if she’s more fragile than fine porcelain. When the retinue reaches the compound, Nhung takes Chih with her ahead of the rest and surveys the strong walls that surround it, wondering aloud if she will find her future here.

The events get weirder after that when a bizarre young man warns Chih to have Nhung ask the lord what happened to his other brides. Wandering around the grounds that night, Chih and Nhung enter several buildings with Nhung coyly asking Chih to go in first and check for monsters. The mystery of the place deepens when the lord’s son, the young man from earlier, warns Chih and reveals something awful about his situation there and old family secrets. But the monsters Chih is expecting aren’t the ones they find.

“The world starts with a story. So do dynasties and eras and wars. So does love, and so does revenge. Everything starts with a story.”

Once again, a perfectly paced story unfolds in novella format. Some novellas end up too rushed or too thinly written with not enough to keep me interested. With the Singing Hills stories, I know that this won’t be the case. Words are carefully used to create and shade in the background worldbuilding which is filled with characters given nutshell sketches that tell us all we need to know about who they are without wasting pages on unneeded information.

The terrible situation is slowly built up, little by little with an aftertaste of unease, like a fire started and then allowed to heat up before bursting out in raging flames. There are subtle clues but they are softly dropped into the story and the reader is allowed to notice them and ponder what they mean before all the plot points are tied together and everything is let loose.

What didn’t work quite as well for me is

Also some threads are left hanging and unresolved. Cleric Chih is going to have a hell of a story to add to the ones at the Singing Hills Monastery but I didn’t feel as if I got all the resolutions by the end that I wanted to have explained. B

~Jayne

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The wandering Cleric Chih returns home to the Singing Hills Abbey for the first time in almost three years, to be met with both joy and sorrow. Their mentor, Cleric Thien, has died, and rests among the archivists and storytellers of the storied abbey. But not everyone is prepared to leave them to their rest.

Because Cleric Thien was once the patriarch of Coh clan of Northern Bell Pass–and now their granddaughters have arrived on the backs of royal mammoths, demanding their grandfather’s body for burial. Chih must somehow balance honoring their mentor’s chosen life while keeping the sisters from the north from storming the gates and destroying the history the clerics have worked so hard to preserve.

But as Chih and their neixin Almost Brilliant navigate the looming crisis, Myriad Virtues, Cleric Thien’s own beloved hoopoe companion, grieves her loss as only a being with perfect memory can, and her sorrow may be more powerful than anyone could anticipate. . .

Dear Nghi Vo, 

I started and finished this novella in one day. As soon as I ended it I thought, I’m not quite sure what that all was but it was brilliant. My book notes state “A story of Singing Hills, young novices, justice, and the way life changes.” 

Cleric Chih is returning home to their abbey of Singing Hills after being gone for three years collecting stories and information to add to the immense archives stored there. As they near home, having made it past the candle ghosts and echo spirits that might or might not haunt the way, they realize things are not going to be what they were expecting. There are mammoths at the gates and not the smaller ones Cleric Chih has seen and been around before. No, these are the giant, royal mammoths that are capable of demolishing a fortress by the count of sixty.

Inside the Abbey are more changes. Most of the archivists and clerics are off doing on-site information gathering elsewhere and Chih’s old friend, who was a novice cleric with them, is the acting Divine. More startling is when Ru tells them that this is what Ru wants to keep doing as due to an injury, they can’t leave to collect stories. Also Cleric Thien, beloved to them both and to the abbey has died. Cleric Thien’s neixin, Myriad Virtues, is grieving, too, while Almost Brilliant is both proud to show off her daughter and hectoring Cleric Chih about what’s going on. There are lots of swirling emotions even before the need to keep the peace with Cleric Thien’s granddaughters who have come, along with their immense mammoths, to claim the body.

After hearing about the Singing Hills abbey through the earlier three novellas, it’s nice to finally “see” it. I would advise new readers to go back and inhale the first novellas before starting here as we are dropped into the action with bits and pieces of backstory about Cleric Chih, Almost Brilliant, and the mission of the abbey. 

There is so much story packed into the short number of pages here and yet, all that needs to be there is there. Names and places are casually dropped into the narrative without much more being said but what is told is all we need to know. I could see a thousand different novellas being spun off of what is mentioned but as this novella is not about those stories, I’m fine with how things are handled. 

As with the other novellas, storytelling is at the heart of what happens. At the remembrance ceremony for Cleric Thien, those left at the abbey and the granddaughters plus their attendants, gather to tell something about Cleric Thien with the neixin listening in to commit it all to memory. New facets of Thein are revealed before a story busts up the event – but only after giving a glimpse of why the granddaughters are really here. Myriad Virtues tells her own story after most everyone has left. 

Change is also a major part of the story. Chih has returned thinking that everything will be the same. Many things are, which is comforting, but not everything. New realities must be navigated and accepted. Life is change, after all. In the end, a new normal is coming into being while a pathway to maintaining good relations with those who command massive mammoths is found. Justice will be done and a grieving neixin will find some peace. A

~Jayne    

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