Fly Back to Me - an ARC Book Review

October 03, 2025

Fly Back to Me - an ARC Book Review

**Thank you to Drea Scott and Love Notes PR for providing me with an e-ARC copy in exchange for my honest review. All thoughts and opinions expressed are my own.**

✨️ Book Title: Fly Back to Me
✨️ Author: Drea Scott
✨️ Genre: Romance
✨️ Tropes: Strangers to lovers, grumpy x sunshine

⭐️ Star Rating: 1 / 5 stars

🌶 Spice Level: 4 / 5 peppers (hot+heavy - significant amount of open-door scenes)

⚠️ Trigger Warnings: Assault, attempted sexual assault, cheating, explicit sexual content

📅 Release Date: October 1, 2025

“I am not obsessed with him,” I counter. “I’m intrigued.”

Dear reader, I’m afraid that “intrigued” was the understatement of the year… and unfortunately, not in a good way.

Fly Back to Me started out really promising to me in terms of the premise (he saves her life, they unknowingly reconnect, and then the story unfolds). Unfortunately, the FMC and the MMC’s personalities really made it hard for me to finish the book.

To start, the FMC Olivia not only needs some serious therapy, but she also needs a serious reality check. I felt her incredible immaturity and lack of any self-respect shone through her obsessive behaviour, and she lacked any character growth throughout this story entirely. When you’re given a second chance in life, would there not be some form of growth as a result? I was also questioning how her roommate/best friend was the only seemingly sane one of the group… and why was she still sticking around for all of this??

Then we move to the MMC, Cade. I don’t even know where to start on this… everything about him was just so unnecessary. The cringy dirty talk, the slut shaming, the random smoking in the beginning, the hypocrisy of calling your girlfriend (later ex) out on cheating… when you kissed another woman while in that same damn relationship. Just everything about him - absolutely not.

And then we have Olivia and Cade together… the toxicity of this relationship was wild to me. It honestly felt like Cade was only using Olivia for sex, and she was naive enough to call it love. They claimed that they are the “perfect couple” and “destined for each other”, with no actual substance to support this. If they were so perfect for each other, why couldn’t they have used their words to communicate like adults instead of throwing temper tantrums when things didn’t go their way?

I also have to address how sugar-coated the trigger warning list was. A few corrections that should have been made include:

Some violence (including threatening at knifepoint)

Should be: Sexual assault at knifepoint

Forbidden kiss

Should be: Cheating between M+FMC

Cheating (committed by side character)

Should be: Cheating (committed by side character and both main characters)

Fatphobia/Toxic diet culture was not mentioned in the trigger warnings, but should have been listed as well for comments made by the FMC and her friend group.

With all this being said, I will give a little bit of credit to the humour some of the one-liners held. Aside from my delusional optimism that this would get better, those one-liners were the only things that kept me from adding this to my DNF’ed list. Otherwise, this unfortunately was not the book for me.