Get a Life, Chloe Brown is an exploration of romance, chronic pain, and living on your own terms
Talia Hibbert’s new novel, Get a Life, Chloe Brown, is sure to be the romance everyone is talking about. It’s delightful, sexy, and utterly refreshing.
Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert might be the most-awaited romance this year. Not only is it from one of the best romance authors of our time, but it’s also #OwnVoices. The main character, Chloe Brown, is a Black woman with fibromyalgia.
And while fibromyalgia may have stopped Chloe from living her life at one point, after seeing her life flash before her eyes in a near-miss car accident, she decides to take her life into her own hands. She starts a “Get a Life” list to start living her life the way she wants.
What’s on the list? It starts with moving out of her parent’s house and moves onto things like riding a motorcycle, having a drunken night out on the town, going camping, traveling the world with only hand luggage, and having meaningless but enjoyable sex.
The first item gets checked off pretty quickly. She finds her own place and begins to be more independent. Chloe works from home on websites for clients and is a self-proclaimed computer geek.
Everything is going great, except for her irritating handyman/super, Redman Morgan aka Red.He is stupidly attractive, an artist, has tattoos and rides a motorcycle, and seem to be nice to everyone except her (rude). To be fair, though, Chloe is not exactly the nicest person when he comes around either.
Well, that is until Chloe finds herself stuck in a tree trying to retrieve a cat. It’s not her finest moment, but it only gets worse when Red is the one to find her there and must help her get out. After he lets her keep the cat (which she names Smudge) until she can find the owner, they begin a reluctant friendship. (Smudge is also the best!)
For “saving” her from the tree, she offers to make a website for him for his art. How does she know he’s an artist? Chloe may or may not have spied on Red through his window while he was painting without a shirt on. (What? Like you wouldn’t?) So, she knows he paints, and it’s all she has to offer after he got her down from the tree.
He accepts, and through this business arrangement, where they pretend they have no romantic interest in each other, she tells Red about her list and asks him to help her tick a few items off of it. He, already quite smitten with the grumpy woman he sees he misjudged, agrees, and they immediately knock riding a motorcycle off the list.
The story continues with Chloe and Red doing more things from her list and, as a result, the two get much, much closer.
They first kiss in Red’s apartment after Chloe reveals how her last relationship ended, but Chloe quickly makes it clear she does not want to talk about it ever again. That lasts a couple days, and then they almost have sex on a flight of stairs in public after their drunken night out.
But that doesn’t mean they go right into being in a relationship. On their way home after the stairs, they run into one of Chloe’s relatives — and let’s just say Red is not happy with the way she treats him around other people.
But after this mild hiccup, they make up and start to date. And then comes the camping! This is one of the best scenes in the whole book. Whether you’re a camping person or not, you’ll find something about this scene that’s enjoyable. There’s humor, plenty of hotness, and a dangerous game of twenty questions where Red reveals why he gave up on being a full-time artist and how horrible his past relationship was (trigger warning for physical and emotional abuse).
Everything seems to be going great until Chloe’s sisters surprise them one morning by coming over. Red gets angry about something Chloe says and he storms out, only to come to his senses minutes later. But seeing how much they can hurt one another, Chloe ends things for good.
Red is not willing to give up so easily. He does everything he can to get her back, but he also works on himself during their time apart. He was deeply hurt after his last relationship and needed to work through some things.
When the story ends, Chloe and Red aren’t exactly the same people they were in the beginning. They change for themselves and for each other. It might make you a little teary eyed.
Get a Life, Chloe Brown is a delightful, hilarious, sexy AF romance. Chloe and Red’s humor and their willingness to challenge each other is perfect and so well written. They’re perfectly matched and going along on their various dates and their ups and downs was wildly fun.
Even their fights were interesting to read because they felt so real — and Talia Hibbert never let them last so long that I got frustrated. Chloe and Red are infinitely lovable because of their stubbornness and past issues, not despite them.
While Chloe’s chronic pain does come into play (how could it not?), it doesn’t stop her from doing the things she wants. She climbs a tree for goodness sake (and that’s not even on her list)! It was refreshing to see a character with pain, especially pain that didn’t get “fixed” by the end of the story. I hope more authors feel they can include pain and illness in their characters, whether it be in romance or another genre. It’s long overdue.
If you love contemporary romances or are looking for an #OwnVoices story about a heroine trying to live her life on her own terms, this is definitely the book for you. Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert comes out on November 5.
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