The Grumpy Player Next Door by Pippa Grant

Tillie Jean Rock is the sister of baseball superstar (well, at least he's really well known in Copper Valley) Cooper Rock. She got involved with one of his teammates ONCE and now her brother is paranoid about her seeing anyone else. Sure, she flirts with most of them but they all know it's not serious. The only one who might reasonably hold her interest is Max Cole but he's avoiding her because Cooper is his best friend on the team and he doesn't want to screw up that relationship. Plus, he had a really complicated childhood and doesn't want to inflict his angst on to anyone else. 

But Max has moved next door to Tillie Jean in the off season and suddenly the close proximity means all bets are off...

One of my least favorite tropes is the "we can't date because you're my sibling's friend." And this book leans hard into Cooper not taking their relationship well. Grant tries to turn it around and make the prank war between Tillie Jean and her siblings amp up because of it but it didn't really click for me. Also, I never really saw that Max was trying to work through his issues with romance. In a romance novel. I wish we had seen more introspection and working toward healing from his crappy childhood but it mostly seemed magically resolved. 

Three stars

This book came out July 8th, 2021

Follows Real Fake Love

Borrowed as ebook from Kindle Unlimited

Opinions are my own

Real Fake Love by Pippa Grant

I'm not sure what it was about this book that captured my attention so much but I stayed up way to late reading it. Actually, I think it was just the sheer zaniness of it. I didn't love the heroine, "Henri" Henrietta Bacon, as she was just a little too peripatetic in her thought process and the flips often threw me out of the story. However, her manic-pixie-dream-girl-ness is updated a little bit by showing what that kind of chaos can leave in it's wake (for her, five broken engagements) and how that can wear on a person. For Henri, she decides it's time to learn how not to fall in love. And, she decides that her latest fiance's childhood best friend is the perfect person to learn from.

Professional baseball player Luca Rossi just wants to play the game, hopefully in the same place for more than a year or two. He definitely doesn't want to fall in love but his Nona (who is famous on TikTok) shows up in his kitchen the morning after Henri shows up on his front steps. And she's making her ziti which, everyone in her family knows is a part of putting the Eye on someone and that person will then fall in love. And woe to those who try to avoid it. 

Luca did have some flaws but, on the whole, he did lean a little bit toward too-good-to-be-true.

Overall, a fun story that was just a bit fluffy but still really fun to read.

Four stars

Follows Jock Blocked

Followed by The Grumpy Player Next Door

This book came out September 3rd, 2020

Borrowed as ebook from Kindle Unlimited

Opinions are my own

Jock Blocked by Pippa Grant

The entire story is based on the heroine trying to cock block the hero because she is really, really, really superstitious about her team winning. I'm going to be honest, if it hadn't been Pippa Grant, I probably would have stopped reading. The heroine irritated me and there was a LOT of tell not show.
Mackenzie knows something that not a lot of people know, Brooks Elliot, famous baseball player, is a virgin at 30.  And she knows (yeah...) that that is what makes him a good baseball player. She's ecstatic that he's been traded to the Fireballs but when she hears that he wants to lose his V-card, she immediately decides that she is going to make sure he doesn't. While she's dressed as a meatball because she is stealing one of the costumes of the current options to replace her beloved Fiery the dragon as the Fireballs mascot. Which she then steals and sends on adventures.

Three stars

Followed by Real Fake Love
This book came out May 19th, 2020
Borrowed from Kindle Unlimited
Opinions are my own