Reviewed by Priya Mathew for Readers' Favorite

Macee McNeill opens Everything I Never Wanted with a setup that could have come straight out of a sitcom. Defense attorney Connor Merritt is on a working vacation at Whispering Sands Island when he hears his new neighbor screaming through the wall. He rushes over expecting a crisis, only to find a mother named Wallace Routledge losing a battle against two toddlers and an open jar of peanut butter. From there, McNeill builds a slow-burn romance between a man avoiding commitment and a woman with no spare time to fall in love, surrounded by Wallace's four children and shadowed by her ex-husband, Jerry, and his controlling mother, Tallulah. Although neither one wants romance, they both get it anyway. When photos of their stolen moments are used as leverage against Wallace’s custody of her children, Connor has to decide whether he wants to be a cautious bystander or a determined protector.

If I were to pick one thing that I loved about Everything I Never Wanted, it is how Macee McNeill has built her characters. Connor could have been another brooding alpha male, all muscle and silence. Instead, he is a giant of a man who gets genuinely invested in a ten-year-old's book report and ends up ambushed in a Nerf gun battle by two gleeful three-year-olds he's supposed to be babysitting. Wallace, for her part, is not written as a woman waiting to be rescued. She rescues herself, over and over, and that independence is what makes her eventual surrender to Connor feel like a gift rather than a necessity. The children also didn’t feel like props added for the cuteness factor. The twins Quint and Demetrius’s wordless mischief, Taylor’s literary opinions, and teenage Annelise’s wise-beyond-her-years tactics made me grow attached to them, just as Connor did. There was enough humor and banter to keep me reading and laughing out loud at inopportune moments. The dialogues between Connor and his cousin Roman are some of the funniest in the book. But the standout for me was the classroom scene where Connor's hypothetical example about a stolen lunch goes sideways the moment he picks a kid actually named Karma, and the whole class nearly riots. Everything I Never Wanted is a comfort read in the best sense, written with humor and just enough conflict to keep the pages turning. If you enjoy small-town romances with plenty of kid chaos, you will find a lot to like here.