Series: Burlfriends, #3
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Steam: 🔥🔥🔥🔥
Release Date: February 14th, 2021
His close colleague, Cassie Green, prefers sport climbing. She’s petite, charming, and already taken—i.e., his exact opposite. Despite their differences, Cassie knows that Tom deserves love like anyone else. That’s why, after countless meetings and work trips together, Cassie vows to find him a partner.
The thing is, he doesn’t want a partner—he wants her. And while searching for his perfect match, Cassie begins to feel the same…except that she’s married.
When her husband proposes a different arrangement, Cassie can’t decide: is this a disaster, or a golden opportunity? The beginning of the end, or the start of something wonderful? To find the answer, all three will have to determine what Happily Ever After means to them.
Are you ready to have your mind blown? Because that’s what Jen Trinh does in the third book of her famous Burlfriends series. I love these characters with my whole mind, body and soul and I love how none of what happened was what I expected it to be. Jen has this talent for creating relatable characters, putting them in relatable settings and just tossing all of you together into the deep end. And with Take Me, she most certainly did that. And it was wonderful!
“He’d ignite a spark within me, then leave it to fizzle out and fade over the next several moments.”
So we’ve got Tom and Cassie, they work together at Stumpstash (which you will recognise from the previous two books). Tom works out of their New York office, while Cassie works from San Francisco. The two of them work really well together at Stumpstash and they do quite a bit of travelling together for work. And that’s where the book picks up – they’re in Thailand and there’s a whole heap of hilarious shenanigans to get you started. But the important things to know are these – Tom’s been in love with Cassie forever and Cassie has been married the whole time.
What I truly loved about their friendship/relationship is that Tom knows he can’t have Cassie, but that doesn’t stop him from putting her first. He admires her as a person, a woman and a colleague and he’s always going out of his way to let her know that. He supports her, uplifts her – and it’s not done in hopes of getting anything out of Cassie, Tom just believes that she deserves more and deserves better. Cassie, on the other hand, is a riot. She’s brilliant. She’s hardworking and passionate and she’s stubborn as a mule. But Cassie is also constantly trying to set Tom up on dates, even though none of them seem to pan out. That’s what makes their friendship so good – they just want the other to be happy, in whatever way that can happen.
Now this is where it gets interesting. Cassie and her husband decide to have an open marriage, to explore polyamory and do something different. They’ve got rules and they follow it perfectly. I’ve never read polyamory in romance before and I love how Jen Trinh breaks it down. You can tell that she’s done her research and spoken to people and gotten the details down perfectly. Seeing Cassie and her husband navigate this is quite interesting too. Their marriage is still secure, they’re still physically and emotionally attracted to each and they still have sex, but there’s just something more in their lives that they enjoy.
“You’re open to the possibility that someone could come into your life and change how you see things. They could change you. And through that mutual change, people can become more compatible.”
With polyamory comes Cassie and Tom coming together in the hottest, steamiest and most incredible sex scenes. It’s raw passion and desire, guys. And that just elevates everything. And you can see that Tom’s love for Cassie truly does make the sex that much more intense and so freaking beautiful. Their relationship develops, dips, spikes and just grows. Their friendship does too and I loved watching them together at work and otherwise.
I cannot say more, at the risk of giving everything away, but just know that you need this book. Step in with an open mind, because it might take some adjusting to. But what Jen Trinh does in Take Me is truly opens your mind to the existence of other kinds of relationships. Not everything has to be so black and white and there’s no shame in wanting to explore, with your partner on the same page. It’s about finding yourself, finding your sexual self and just making sense of what you want and desire.
“She made me feel more than whole.”
The book embraces and celebrates the kind of relationships that society often frowns upon. It’s not about shaming people, it’s about accepting them and their choices for who and what they are. This book will also make you feel things and make you think about your own choices – not in a way that will make you say ‘Oh, I should try that too’, but more in the sense of ‘Have you done what you desire in your relationship’.
Please, please, please take the time to read the Burlfriends series, because Jen Trinh has created a world beyond anything we can imagine. There’s lots of climbing and I promise, if you’re like me and the most inflexible person ever, you’ll still want to suddenly learn how to climb. Jen writes such detailed and fantastical books that will leave you wanting more. And then open you mind, body and soul to the magic of Take Me.
Thanks to Jen Trinh for generously providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
anna reads here 