#AudioBookReview: Our Perfect Storm by Carley Fortune

Our Perfect Storm by Carley Fortune
Narrator: AJ Bridel, Jack Copeland
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss, supplied by publisher via Libro.fm
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: contemporary romance, friends to lovers romance
Pages: 410
Length: 10 hours and 51 minutes
Published by Berkley, Penguin Audio on May 5, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Best friends have one week in paradise to fix their friendship or fall apart in this heart-stopping, utterly romantic new novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Every Summer After and One Golden Summer.
Frankie and George have been best friends since they were eight years old. Both passionate, impulsive, and headstrong—they’ve always clashed . . . and come back together. Until now. It’s the eve of Frankie’s wedding weekend, and she doesn’t know where they stand or even if George will show up as her best man.
Then, at the start of the festivities, in walks George. For one glorious evening, surrounded by her loved ones, Frankie’s life is finally perfect. But it all comes crashing down when her fiancé dumps her the next morning, leaving only a note as an explanation.
Crushed and confused, Frankie returns to her family’s home to wallow. But George has a different idea and a plan for healing Frankie’s broken heart. He wants her to go on her honeymoon. With him. For one week, to the lush rainforests and misty beaches of Tofino.
Frankie agrees, seeing the trip for what it really is: one last chance to repair their friendship. Even if it means unearthing secrets and long buried feelings neither knows how to handle. Even if it means falling apart for good.

My Review:

The idea of this story is terrific. The execution didn’t quite work for me as well as I’d hoped. Although I can’t say this enough, the audio narration was terrific and made a story that didn’t live up to its potential worth listening to all the same.

This is a friends-to-lovers story. In fact, it’s about the lifelong friendship between Frankie and George. They’ve been besties since they were EIGHT. Most people are lucky if they can hang onto one friendship half that long, but Frankie and George are thirty when this story begins and in some ways are every bit as close as they were when George moved in next door over twenty years ago.

And in other ways they are miles apart. Mostly in secrets. The secret that George has been keeping from Frankie since they were 14, if not earlier. And the secret that Frankie has been keeping from herself every single bit as long.

George is supposed to be Frankie’s best man at her wedding to someone else. She’s a nervous wreck at her own rehearsal dinner because she can’t imagine doing this – or anything else important in her life – without George at her side. George is coming because he promised he would be there for her. Even if she’s breaking his heart. Because she doesn’t know that she is and he’s not planning to tell her. EVER.

Whether he should have stuck to that plan or not is one thing. Whether he should have broken it quite so thoroughly is another. Whether they can get past the mess they both make out of the result is yet to be determined.

But they have to try. Even if Frankie doesn’t know exactly what they’re trying for. Or about. Or why it always had to be just this messy along the way.

Escape Rating B-: The storm may be perfect but this book isn’t nearly so. The audio was terrific, which is why I stuck with it to the point that I had to finish, but the story drove me bananas until the 2/3rds mark, and that’s way too long to be talking back to an audiobook.

The IDEA of this as a friends into lovers story had SO MUCH possibility. I liked Frankie and George as characters and loved the idea of their lifelong best friendship. BUT, I knew from the opening pages that Frankie was being willfully obtuse about her upcoming marriage to Nate and especially the nature of her adult relationship with George. Or at least his adult feelings for her.

It’s so, so obvious to the reader that George has been in love with Frankie for years – if not possibly forever – from the minute he enters the scene. At her rehearsal dinner for her wedding to someone else.

I started wanting to reach through the audio with a clue-by-four and didn’t stop until the penny dropped for her much, MUCH too late. Or too long. Healing takes as long as it takes, and people lie to themselves ALL THE TIME, but her obstinate, angsty blindness went on for too many words and too many pages.

In other words, the story dragged A LOT in the middle. If the audio performances by AJ Bridel as Frankie and Jack Copeland as George hadn’t been excellent, I’d have bailed early. But they WERE excellent and the way the audio was performed – not as alternate chapters but as Frankie’s narration of her perspective on events and her internal thoughts with George’s own voice in her head worked better than the now usual alternating chapters and voices.

This would be a C rating if not for the audio. They’re that good. And the story needs them to be.

In the end, I got why George hid his feelings from Frankie for so long – even if the way he went about the reveal was a bit shitty. The whole thing finally started to work when Frankie started figuring out that she’d been lying to herself for reasons that made a whole lot of sense – IN THE END.

But by the time I got to that end I was mostly sticking with it to see if my guesses about why her erstwhile groom bailed on the wedding the night before were correct. Which they were. In the end, this story turned out to be a combination of too much obviousness and too much obliviousness tied up with a tiny bow of obnoxiousness in one tantalizing package.

And by that I mean the descriptions of Tofino, which is a real place that I would love to visit – just not along with Frankie and George.

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