She writes with astonishing empathy, but never pity, both seeing and demanding the best in her characters and her readers.
Like her heroine, Hibbert blends insightful literary and cultural commentary with a love story that’s exuberant, hilarious, and restorative. But it also takes care to validate those less engaged with romance with a capital 'R' with its love for Dani just as she is, if only she’ll let down her walls. Happy endings, as Zaf points out, aren’t formulaic spoilers, they are safety nets. It engages directly with popular criticism that romance is unrealistic, perhaps even detrimental, by framing it as Zaf’s saving grace in combatting his mental anguish. In this winking, divinely funny tale of a fake relationship turned real, Hibbert finds space to unpick everything from toxic masculinity to racism in academia to romance as balm (shout-out to her Beverly Jenkins reference). Zaf and Dani are filled with tremendous care for each other. She describes anxiety in piercingly true ways. Hibbert has this incisive ability to cut right to the heart of something, and she does it again here with anxiety, grief, and feelings of inadequacy. Read this romance immediately, and then read it again. Dani is the heroine we all aspire to be: confident, feminist, sex-positive and driven. Zaf is the emotionally competent, buff hero of our dreams. Take a Hint, Dani Brown possesses the same amount of charm, grit and, certainly, sex appeal as its predecessor. Fans who loved the first book in the Brown Sisters series, Get a Life, Chloe Brown, may feel that it’s a tough act to follow. It’s not about love as the antidote to a couple’s problems, but love becoming a foundation on which the couple understand one another better and a soft place to land when times are tough. What makes Take a Hint, Dani Brown a superlative example of the romance genre as a whole, and not just a gem in the contemporary category, is that Hibbert gets to the essence of what a happily-ever-after means. Hibbert knows how to deepen and complicate her characters, meticulously peeling back layer upon layer as the story goes on. an easy contender for best book of the year.
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