Lauren Connolly’s new romance explores the journey of grief through a road trip that brings two exes together for a second chance romance. While it’s all green lights for Maddie and Dom’s journey of dealing with loss, the romance itself could use a little tune up.
My first book of the year has arrived, and 2025’s distinction goes to Lauren Connolly’s new romance, PS: I HATE YOU. This is a bit of a heavy way to start the year as Connolly’s book falls in the grief/romance space that seems to be so popular –and the book deals certainly as much with grief if not more so than it deals with the second chance romance between Maddie and Dom. And while I definitely had some challenges with the romance aspect of the book, the end here is better than the first three quarters of the story, which in my mind is a solid way to start the new year of romance reading!
PS: I HATE YOU (a title that honestly didn’t make a ton of sense in the context of this book) starts off at the funeral of Josh, Maddie’s beloved brother and Dom’s best friend. While Josh has left individual letters for other family members, including his and Maddie’s self-involved mother, Josh has left a series of letters addressed to both Maddie and Dom together. Josh was a travel photographer and spent his life seeing the world before dying of cancer in his 30s. In the letters, he asks Maddie and Dom to visit eight states he hasn’t visited and gives them coordinates and a letter to specific places within each state in which to spread his ashes. Over the next two years, Maddie and Dom meet up to fulfill Josh’s wish. The challenging part for Maddie is that Dom was not only Josh’s best friend–he and his twin brothers grew up with Maddie and Josh and Maddie was head over heels in love with Dom as a teenager. When he finally reciprocated his feelings for her at 19, the next morning she overheard him proposing to Josh and Dom’s other best friend, Rosaline. Devastated, Maddie fled to the other side of the country and hasn’t interacted with Dom in over a decade.
While I love a second chance romance, I struggled here, particularly in the first third of the book with the dynamic between Maddie and Dom and how immature and disgusted Maddie was behaving towards Dom. They have a very barbed relationship, and all of that animosity is coming from Maddie’s side. It feels extreme, to the place that it’s hard to believe Dom would just keep shouldering her snark. Yes, she is using humor to cover up both the pain of her grief over Josh as well as the pain surrounding Dom’s betrayal, but it can read extremely immature rather than just hurt. This is a tough way to be introduced to Maddie who is our way in to the story, and I think could turn readers off early.
As Maddie learns more about Dom, she mellows out a bit, and they settle into a relationship with more push and pull. The book takes place over two years, so there are frequent time jumps of a few months between trips which allows her character time to grow. Dom, on the other hand, is very stoic and deals with his grief by being overprotective of the people he loves, including Maddie. I liked him as the love interest here, though some of his actions in the last third of the story feel equally extreme and unrealistic given that Maddie is demanding space from him.
I also found it challenging that neither Maddie nor Dom talks to each other about that night that ruined everything until very late in the story. It doesn’t seem realistic that Maddie, who has been haunted by what happened between her and Dom, wouldn’t bring it up. Why did he hook up with her if he was in love with Rosaline? Why would he not have tried to explain it to Maddie ever? Now that he and Rosaline have gotten a divorce, it seems like the appropriate time for Maddie to ask–or even for Dom to try to explain it to Maddie. The fact that Maddie does not ask leads to further insecurity for her during the start of their new relationship as she assumes both that he will leave her eventually and that he is still in love with Rosaline. The book needs narrative drive that this secret provides, but it doesn’t feel realistic that neither would bring it up as it is the reason that they are not together and haven’t spoken in so long.
On the plus side, the travel aspect of this book is fun, and each location feels sentimental and surprising for both Maddie and Dom. This is one of the most successful parts of the book and the reason I felt like Connolly’s ability to deal with the characters’ grief journeys was stronger than the romance as both Maddie and Dom grow emotionally throughout the story and discover vulnerability with each other. Both of their journeys have twists and turns and surprises along the way as they struggle to understand what Josh wanted for them as well as the meaning of his short life. This gives both characters more depth than the romantic story does, which helps keep the book moving. Connolly’s strength here also allows Josh to feel like the third main character, despite the lack of his physical presence, as we learn more about him on each trip. He feels fully rounded by the end of the novel.
I enjoyed kicking off 2025 with a romantic road trip and it definitely inspired my wanderlust for the new year. While I didn’t love every aspect of the romance in PS: I HATE YOU, I still felt there was enough to enjoy in the book and definitely felt the ending makes up for quite a bit. Hopefully it’s a kick off to even greater second chance and travel romances to come this year!!
4 stars out of 5
Synopsis (from Amazon):
Maddie Sanderson would be proud to honor her older brother’s dying wish, that she scatters his ashes over eight destinations that the adventurous 29-year-old never got to visit before he died from cancer. But in his will, Josh assigned her an impossible partner to help complete the mission—Dominic Perry. Seriously, if Maddie weren’t already at her brother’s funeral, she would have killed him for this.
Sure, Dom was Josh’s life-long best friend. He’s also the infuriating man who broke Maddie’s heart back when she was naïve enough to give it to him. But since Dom insists on following the rules and Josh didn’t leave much room for Maddie to argue the matter, they embark together on a series of farewell trips that span thousands of miles, exploring new places and revisiting their complicated history along the way.
After a snowstorm leads to a shared bed, Maddie starts to wonder if her brother might be matchmaking from the grave. But when grief also reopens old wounds between them, Maddie will need more than Josh’s ghostly guidance to trust Dom again.
