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Talia Hibbert is a master craftsperson when it comes to romance novels, and she continues to demonstrate her ability to woo a reader’s heart with her latest release, Take a Hint, Dani Brown, book two in her Brown Sisters series.
Part-time teacher and PhD student Danika – Dani – Brown has a great life. She loves her job, she has her best friend, Sorcha, with her, and her life’s on a solid course overall – even though she cracked an egg into a bowl of cake mix, stirred it up and ate it in the wake of her last break-up.
Handsome university security guard and ex-rugby player Zafir “Zaf” Ansari is both romantic and practical – the kind of guy who would run up several flights of stairs to save someone, and also someone who listens to romance audiobooks during his lunch breaks. But he’s got his own scars, and suffers from serious anxiety following the death of his father and brother in a car crash.
Zaf has a crush on Dani, but Dani is resistant to anything but a fling at the moment. After the breakup of her last relationship with her girlfriend, Jo (the one that caused her to eat raw cake mix), she’s sworn she’s going to have a little fun with her romantic life instead of worrying about love.
Fate intervenes when Dani becomes trapped in an elevator during a fire drill and Zaf rescues her from her plight in a most dashing way. A video of him carrying her out of the building bridal-style hits Twitter and goes viral. Dubbed #drrugbae by the Twitter populace, Zaf and Dani strike a bargain – they decide to pretend to date for the sake of Zaf’s charity, which teaches underprivileged kids to play soccer. This is all well and good to Dani because hey, she might get her desired fling out of it after all. But to keep up the ruse they have to spend time together – and Dani finds herself, step by step and moment by moment, falling in love with Zaf.
I love Talia Hibbert’s prose, and Take a Hint, Dani Brown is a warm embrace of a book – terribly funny, and also terribly real and romantic. There’s so much to love about this book, from its charming characters to its warm university town setting to the way it manages to explain just how scary allowing oneself to fall in love can be.
Dani is a wonderfully nerdy person – she’s a geek for education and not afraid to show it. She’s also a sensualist, a lover of food, a person who loves her family and her best friend (naughty Sorcha is one of my favorite supporting characters, along with Zaf’s cousin, Fatima) and dedicated to her religion (though Sorcha declares jokingly that she and Dani are “shitty witches” due to their dilatory worship). The negative effects of her own mistakes with Jo have closed Dani off to romance, but she tries to be confident in who she is.
Zaf, meanwhile, is all exposed heart – it’s on his sleeve and beating away for all to see.
Dani and Zaf have fire – good banter, great chemistry, a believable romance. They are a wonder to behold, and they have an intriguing and powerful connection that keeps the reader eagerly flipping the pages. They balance each other’s weaknesses and strengths beautifully.
Along with the aforementioned Fatima and Sorcha, we do get to see Chloe, Dani’s sister, though much more briefly in this volume. Everyone – from the kids under Zaf’s tutelage we meet briefly to Dani’s colleagues – all feel fun and fleshed out.
As always, the world of academia flowers beneath Hibbert’s pen. The end result is a wonderful, realistic romance that combines humor and tenderness, and real, adult emotions with realistic reactions. Take a Hint, Dani Brown is a beautiful romance that deserves every accolade which will come its way.
Buy it at: Amazon, Audible, or your local independent bookstore
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Grade: A
Book Type: Contemporary Romance
Sensuality: Warm
Review Date: 23/06/20
Publication Date: 06/2020
Recent Comments …
Yep
This sounds delightful! I’m grabbing it, thanks
excellent book: interesting, funny dialogs, deep understanding of each character, interesting secondary characters, and also sexy.
I don’t think anyone expects you to post UK prices – it’s just a shame that such a great sale…
I’m sorry about that. We don’t have any way to post British prices as an American based site.
I have several of her books on my TBR and after reading this am moving them up the pile.
Lisa Fernandes is a writer, reviewer and recapper who lives somewhere on the East Coast. Formerly employed by Firefox.org and Next Projection, she also currently contributes to Women Write About Comics. Read her blog at http://thatbouviergirl.blogspot.com/, follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/thatbouviergirl or contribute to her Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/MissyvsEvilDead or her Ko-Fi at ko-fi.com/missmelbouvier
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When it comes to contemporary romances these days, I feel like I’m reading a different book than everyone else. Take a Hint, Dani Brown was another one that has me scratching my head (mostly at myself and what I must be missing).
The commitment phobia trope is getting old. It meant there were a lot of internal monologues where Dani was repeating her “I don’t do relationships” mantra over and over. I was bored for the first third of the book because of the sex talk and the internal monologues. I thought the overall love story was sweet, but I didn’t feel the immense chemistry between the leads that other readers seemed to. She basically wanted him for orgasms and I’m not 100% sure what first attracted Zaf to Dani.
I did like Zaf a lot and his character growth was fantastic. I liked Dani, and although I didn’t warm up to her as much, I still enjoyed seeing her personal growth. That part of the story was really well done.
I just finished reading this, and I can certainly understand why it’s got so many glowing reviews – it was awesome! Zaf and Dani are just lovely, both together and on their own, and I’m so glad I got to know and spend time with these characters. I think this is my new favorite book by Hibbert. Also, what really struck me about Hibbert’s writing: I find that Hibbert has a distinctive voice as an author, a refreshing and creative one, and I’ve come to really appreciate how representative and diverse her works are.
Since the review highlights the strengths of the novel in a way I’m not quite able to but totally agree with, I only really have one thing to add. It’s a small detail amongst many other cool details, but I thought it worth mentioning. It was great to see a character in a romance novel with a sensitive gag reflex. It is my understanding that having a sensitive gag reflex is not that unusual, but I can’t remember having ever read about one before in a romance novel. (I’m still relatively new to the genre though.) It was beautifully dealt with in regard to oral sex, for example, and I think it’s wonderful that Hibbert had included it in the book.
My romance of the year TBH! Glad you liked it!
I’m happy to hear this one’s a winner. I could barely get through Get A Life, Chloe Brown in which I found the storyline grim and the heroine profoundly unlikable. I loved her Ravenswood series–it sounds as if she’s returned to the joy in those books.
I liked the first book in the series, but this one is indeed a bit lighter in tone than the first.
I whole-heartedly agree that Hibbert is one of the best craftspersons writing romances today. I love the driven career woman/laid-back man dynamic, and these two characters have some crazy chemistry. Zafir is just a wonderful hero, but Hibbert also creates some of the sharpest heroines out there. My only drawback with this book is that I did struggle at times to understand Dani’s anxiety and commitment phobia when it reached into psychological territory around prior relationship trauma. Otherwise, I think this is a terrific new book from a wonderful author.
The chemistry was off-the-charts great, wasn’t it?
See, that worked for me. It’s clear that what happened with Jo is deeply affecting to her, which is why she feels better after they’ve hashed things out.
Oh yeah, I understood the Jo relationship, but the trauma she reveals from her relationship with Matteo at the end was a bit of a surprise. It seemed to be more at the heart of her fear of relationships than Jo. I think too I’m not generally fond of commitment phobia as an obstacle to romances.
Having said all of that, Hibbert’s an author who just represents. This book offers a wonderfully diverse world. At a moment of so much civil unrest, I welcomed my brief time in the world she creates.
Ahh yeah, I was trying to avoid revealing that ’cause plot spoilers!
Yeah, her commitmentphobia defines her interactions with Zaf a lot, but honestly I’m glad it’s a trait she has because it’s something that tends to be attached to alpha male types.
I agree that commitment phobia is definitely a trope associated with men in romances. Making the woman career driven here and hesitant to allow a man to take up too much space definitely worked for me. However, the actual commitment phobia still didn’t here for the same reasons that I feel when men have it. I almost never quite believe all of the abstract reasons that lead to the problem – bad relationships, low self-esteem, cynicism about people or life, bad parenting, etc. I’ve come to realize that it’s just not a trope that appeals to me or that I find convincing. In this book I kept waiting for an explanation and when it came, it arrived too late and wasn’t satisfying. It was a small issue in the scheme of things but did take away a bit for me.
That makes sense to me!
I really loved it. The banter was great, and I genuinely liked Dani (unlike her sister Chloe, who bugged me; looking forward to Eve’s story, though).
Glad you liked it!
I just put Eve’s book in my GR’s 2021 folder as there is now an offical publication date for it. It sounds really good!