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After ending her long-term relationship with her non-Armenian boyfriend, Nar decides to agree to let her mother help her find a new boyfriend among the eligible Armenian bachelors of San Francisco. She plans to spend the next month at local Explore Armenia events, meeting the men her very determined mother has picked out for her. At her very first event, however, she meets Erebuni, a smart and charming woman with whom she feels more of a connection than she does any of the mom-approved men she is supposed to be looking for.
Despite the premise, Taleen Voskuni’s beautifully titled Sorry, Bro does not spend nearly as much time as I feared it might on the search for a man. While Nar is theoretically at these events to meet certain men, her actual searching for the most part extends only so far as a brief conversation before determining she has no interest in him and then spending the rest of the event hanging out with Erebuni. In fact, Nar recognizes right from the beginning that she has a crush on Erebuni, and the only thing stopping her from dropping her search entirely is the fact that she is not ready to be out to her family yet.
As a big friends-to-lovers fan, I really vibed with this book. I find I tend to get frustrated when a romance spends too long trying to convince me these characters don’t like each other or, in this case, pursuing other people, so I appreciated the way this one got to the point. Nar and Erebuni liked each other from the beginning, and it was merely a matter of figuring out where to go from there.
I will say, I personally prefer dual-POV romance over singular-POV—for various reasons, but the one that is most relevant being that singular POV can make me feel locked out of one person’s head, and I did get a bit of that feeling with this one. This was particularly true when it came to the third-act conflict. Because of the way things played out, I really would have liked to actually see Erebuni’s perspective on all of that, and the fact that we didn’t, coupled with how long that section of the book went on, made it feel more like Nar’s story than Nar-and-Erebuni’s story.
Still, I really loved this book. Nar’s voice was funny and engaging. For all her faults, I completely understood where she was coming from, and I understood why Erebuni would love her. And Erebuni—I know a lot of people complain about instalove (I am not one of those people, and I wouldn’t call this book instalove either, to be clear), but I was as charmed by her from the beginning as Nar was. Their romance was likewise charming, and an excellent example of why I prefer friends-to-lovers over most other romantic dynamics. Their connection was clear from the beginning, their friendship as believable as the romance that grew out of it.
As a romance and a love letter to Armenian culture, to family and friendship, I wholeheartedly recommend this book. Sorry, Bro has earned Taleen Voskuni a place on my authors-to-watch list, and I hope yours as well.
