Our Perfect Storm by Carley Fortune - Romance Book Review

This was a gorgeous, addictive love story – possibly my first 6 star romance read of the year!

Our Perfect Storm by Carley Fortune is now available to buy, click below!

Frankie and George have been best friends basically their entire lives, and now it’s the eve of Frankie’s wedding and she’s impatiently waiting for him as her best man to show up. But then her fiance leaves her, pretty much at the altar, with just a note with no explanation. Instead of taking a dream honeymoon with her husband, George convinces her to to let him take her. They head across the country to a luxurious, romantic resort on Vancouver Island where he guides her through a several step process of getting over her fiance – but long-repressed feeling start to pop up while they’re surfing, hiking through the rainforest and, of course, sharing the one bed.

This was my first Carley Fortune book and absolutely will not be my last. I was honestly utterly obsessed with it.

If you’ve read any of my other romance reviews, you’ll know that setting is often just as important to me as the romance. I adore a strong sense of place in a story, especially if it’s somewhere that I connect with. This book is set in Tofino on Vancouver Island, a place I’ve only been once on an RV trip in my 20s, but I loved it there – I dream about going back (it’s a long way!). The book captured the setting so perfectly and it didn’t just add the perfect backdrop to the story, it enhanced it.

The chemistry between Frankie and George was ON FIRE. I’m normally more of an enemies to lovers girly than a friends to lovers – I often think they feel too “safe”, if that makes sense – but this might have changed my opinion entirely. Their friendship was already so beautiful – stronger than most, even though recent events had them feeling drawn apart – that it felt like the biggest risk for them to potentially ruin it. You could feel the yearning so hard!

The character depth was brilliant. Frankie was headstrong but had been squashed in her relationship with her fiance and her work; she’s also rebuilding a broken relationship with her mother and how that has affected her commitment to others. George had been deeply affected by his dangerous work around fires (by the way, I loved how this real event, the Canadian fires of 2023, was handled in the story) and his own damaged parental relationship. I loved the way the story slowly built up the depth of the relationship between the two, bouncing between highly charged current scenes and stories from their past. This constantly changing pace kept pulling me through “just one more chapter” until I’d finished the book in two quick settings. It was addictive and enthralling.