A man she ends up dating models how best to relate to someone who identifies thus, taking things very slowly and gaining her consent to “move to another level” which might be holding hands, etc. She panics if people move too fast on her and shuts them down. The diversity in the book is intensified by Tiwanda having gray/grey sexuality (which I think, having researched it, is a position on the asexual continuum where someone has limited sexual responses but only to someone they’re very close to and safe with), and she’s attracted to men and women. I didn’t mind this element as it was in the background, just a bit of “woo” when she feels like it might be influenced by her late mum.

She meets four matches and can ask the app a question a day, but of course real life does butt in and change her decisions. There are also two characters who use “They” pronouns Meanwhile, she updates her best friends, two friends and a cousin, and adopts a dog, and this again is done carefully, demonstrating good dog adoptership.īut there’s a slight fantasy element, which was OK but not entirely perhaps needed – she’s had an app, Met, sent to her via her cousin Corinne, who found her partner through it (in the last book), which is a sort of sentient dating app which sends matches her way in real life, chiming when she meets them. We watch Tiwanda progress through a conference and mentoring, meeting a range of other folk, including a Deaf couple (her cousin can sign fluently, she can sign a bit, and that’s probably down to the author being an ASL interpreter) and a lesbian woman who becomes a good friend. When her grandma and aunt (the main family in her life as she lost her mum at a young age and her dad a little later) stage an intervention, it works, and it comes at the same time as a chance in an incubator programme for Black-owned businesses in Chicago.

Tiwanda has just turned 30 but she hasn’t actually got time to turn 30 properly because she has a day job she hates and is trying to develop her soap making / chocolate making experience business on the side. I was a bit sad to realise this was a sequel as you really would need to read “Have We Met” first, because this one has spoilers for that, but it’s a good standalone read, too.

My second NetGalley book for July, and this was an interesting novel about 30-something entrepreneurial lives in Chicago with a deliciously diverse cast and a good amount of detail – just what I like.

Camille baker have we met