Goodreads: Kiss Me Not (Kiss Me #1)
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Panda Rating:

What do you do when you’re the reigning kissing booth champion but the only person you want to kiss is your best friend’s brother?

Let me make this clear right here, right now: I, Halley Dawson, do not care that Preston Wright is kissing other women. Not a lick. Not at all. Nuh-uh-freakin’-uh.
I do care that he’s doing it six feet away from me behind a gaudy velvet curtain—making him my competition in this year’s kissing contest.

Why do I care, you ask? Because I’ve had an unfortunate crush on the insufferable idiot since I was sixteen years old, but I also know it’s never going to happen. He’s the Creek Falls bachelor to die for, and I’m the Creek Falls racoon lady who puts peanut butter sandwiches out for them every night. I’m not going to let him break my four-year-long reign—no matter how many times he breaks the rules and slides the curtain across to do the one thing he’s not allowed to: Kiss me.

Kiss Me Not is a short and fluffy romantic comedy that certainly had me giggling at times but overall, I thought was just alright. The enemies-to-lovers story focuses on our MCs Halley and Preston. Halley is the all-around golden girl and notorious Raccoon lady, and Preston is her best friend’s older brother and the most eligible bachelor of Creek Falls. Halley has been the reigning champion of the town’s Kissing Booth for the last four years, but this year Preston is her competition and soon bets are made and truths come out.

I enjoyed the story and the characters. Thankfully there was no insta-love connection between the MCs, but more like a giving in to the chemistry that was already there at the start. Halley and Preston were fun characters and their banter was super flirty. I loved Halley’s determination to not care about what people think about her, especially in a town full of shallow residents who only cared about money. She is a strong, smart and independent woman whose character I admired. I loved the little trash pandas that visited her every night (maybe minus Boris, The Horny) and her compassion for animals made me like her even more! I liked that Preston was not the typical bachelor who serial-dated all the girls in town; he didn’t do one-night stands and although he was annoyingly grumpy at times, he seemed like a pretty decent guy. That said, we didn’t really get to learn about them in great depth, and there also wasn’t that much character growth because the book was pretty short and didn’t allow for that; which I thought was a pity.

The heat in this book was fairly mild. In a way it’s a bit of a slow burn because nothing besides kissing happens for the majority of the book, and the kissing scenes were also quite chaste (if I’m thinking in comparison to other contemporary romances of late).

Overall, a fun romance with some of the tropes I do enjoy the most (small town, best friend’s brother, enemies-to-lovers); although I do wish it was longer so that we could get to know these characters more as they were definitely all fun and spirited! This was my first book by Emma Hart and I’m looking forward to reading some of her other books soon.

Have you read Kiss Me Not?