Rating: 3 stars 

Format: eBook (Digital Review Copy via NetGalley)

To Get to the Other Side (out December 6th, 2022) was one of my most anticipated NetGalley reads this year. The premise of a woman who rescues a chicken that’s crossing the road, then finds herself in need of a new place to live, grabbed my attention from the get-go. Add in the fact that she responds to a quirky roommate advert and winds up in a forced proximity, mutual pining situation? Yes, please. 

Many thanks to NetGalley and Alcove Press for the digital review copy. 

I wanted to love this book. It has cute animals and a forced proximity romance, and what more can a girl ask for? There are definitely some great laugh out loud moments and plenty of mutual pining to be had in this rom com. I also appreciated the author’s efforts to tackle the impact of gender stereotypes and how they can influence the way men and women are comfortable behaving in public. 

However, there were some aspects that felt a bit heavy-handed and repetitive. In particular, both characters are explicitly working through some issues from their past. While it’s great that they’re both self-aware, their thoughts around these challenges took up a lot of space witout necessarily moving the plot or character development forward. This pulled me out of the story after a while because it became a bit repetitive, so I wasn’t able to enjoy the book as much as I wanted to. 

In all, this was a cute story that delivered on the adorable animals and the occasional laughs. I just wish it was a bit more streamlined and that the characters had a bit more breadth to them. To Get to the Other Side is a great fit for animal lovers and fans of a close proximity romance with a lot of tension between the leads.