A Little Kissing Between Friends Review

Verdict: A hot, funny, deeply Black and queer stud/femme friends-to-lovers romance with a community readers adore, undercut by a miscommunication spiral and a stud lead whose worst moments cost her a lot of readers’ goodwill.

Best for: Readers who want a fat stud and a bisexual femme single mom, explicit heat with a switch dynamic, a sex-positive strip-club and studio setting, and a big loving family on the page, and who can forgive two grown women refusing to have one honest conversation.

Heat level: ★★★★☆ (4/5 — romance.io’s “explicit open door”)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.5/5 — a 3.69 Goodreads average across 2,028 ratings, with a third of readers parked at three stars)

Tropes: Friends to lovers, best friends with benefits, butch/femme, stud lead, bisexual heroine, single mom, jealousy as the spark, miscommunication, found family, dual POV.

A Little Kissing Between Friends by Chencia C. Higgins is a standalone contemporary lesbian romance from Harlequin’s Carina Adores imprint, set in Houston’s music and club scene — and the collision at its centre is Cyn Tha Starr, a stud producer with a rotating roster of femmes, realising that the woman she can’t stop thinking about is Jucee, her best friend and the top dancer at the strip club Sanity.

It holds a 3.69 average across 2,028 Goodreads ratings, drew positive reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus, and arrived as the follow-up to D’Vaughn and Kris Plan a Wedding, her breakout. Many readers measure it against that book. What they found is a steamier, messier book — and why the mess splits them is worth understanding before you start.

What Is A Little Kissing Between Friends About?

A Little Kissing Between Friends is a friends-to-lovers romance in its riskiest form: not a slow realisation, but two best friends who start sleeping together and try to keep calling it friendship. It is also a community novel. Houston here is studio sessions, a club with its own family, restaurants one reader wishes were real and a multigenerational Black queer circle that treats Cyn and Jucee as a couple long before they do.

Cyn is a fat, cis lesbian stud with a career that is taking off and a policy of never committing to anyone. Jucee is a plus-size bisexual femme, a single mother who co-parents amicably with her son’s father and has put dating on hold. The book alternates between their first-person voices, which is its best and most dangerous choice: you hear Jucee’s second-guessing in full, and you hear exactly what Cyn is thinking — including thoughts some readers wish they hadn’t.

What Makes This Stud/Femme Friends-to-Lovers Romance Work

The representation: A fat lesbian stud and a plus-size bisexual femme, both Black, both desirable on their own terms. 92% of StoryGraph readers call the cast diverse, and reviewers repeatedly say they have rarely seen a stud lead in a romance at all.
Cyn as a butch without the toxicity: The Lesbian Library praises her as an authentic masculine lead who never slides into toxic masculinity — which matters, because the butch/femme dynamic is central rather than decorative.
The family and community: Cyn’s family is the element even the three-star reviewers love. They adore Jucee, and when Cyn behaves badly, her father and brother are the ones who call her on it.
Sex-positive sex work: Jucee dances at Sanity and the book respects it. One reader compares the setting to P-Valley.
The voice: Higgins writes funny, specific dialogue, and the opening flashback of nine-year-old Cyn telling her dad about her “girlfriend” gets singled out as precious.

Book Synopsis

Cyn Tha Starr has built her life the way she builds a track: exactly how she wants it. The studio is where she works, the club is where she plays, and no woman stays long enough to complicate anything. The one fixture is Jucee. They eat together, show up for each other’s families, and touch in ways everyone around them has noticed.

Jucee has her own architecture. She works the early shift at Sanity, where she is the dancer everyone comes to see, and spends her evenings with her son, her club family or on Cyn’s couch. Then one of Cyn’s casual flings rubs Jucee the wrong way, the jealousy on both sides is impossible to miss, and a night out ends with the two of them looking at each other very differently.

So they try something sensible. They are adults; they can have a little fun without breaking the best thing either of them has. They set terms, keep it light, and promise nothing changes. Except Cyn hears Jucee in every beat she makes now, Jucee catches herself wanting more than the arrangement allows, and neither of them is willing to be the first to say so. The question the book is built on is whether two people this close can risk telling each other the truth — or whether keeping the friendship safe will be exactly what costs them both.

My Review

The first 40% is the strongest thing here, and readers across the whole star range agree on it. The friendship reads as real and lived-in, the banter is quick and funny, and the world around the two women — the studio, the club, Cyn’s family, Jucee’s son — is warm without being sanded down.

The second strength is how completely the book belongs to its community. The people around the couple do real work — they notice, they push, they pull Cyn back into line. Cannonball Read’s reviewer calls it a love letter to community, friendship, music and food, and that is the right frame. The heat is the other draw. The sex scenes are explicit, frequent and genuinely charged, and The Lesbian Library specifically praises the switch dynamic and a stud who bottoms, which is still rare on the page.

Where it struggles is the back half, and this is not a personal gripe — miscommunication is the single most repeated criticism in the reviews, and both Kirkus and The Lesbian Library name it as the book’s frustration. Around the 60% mark the couple settles into a cycle of assumptions, walkouts and unsaid feelings that several readers describe as high-school drama between grown women; one sums it up as a plot one conversation could resolve. On top of that sits Cyn herself. A biphobic remark she makes to Jucee during a fight is flagged by multiple reviewers, and some felt the apology did not match the harm. Two more quote a late passage in Cyn’s head about Jucee being more “malleable” after sex or a good meal, and read it as manipulation.

One expectation to reset: the cover and title promise a breezy rom-com, and StoryGraph readers do tag it lighthearted and funny. But this is a thornier book than D’Vaughn and Kris, with a stud lead who is flawed on purpose and a conflict built from her flaws. If you came for a low-angst romp, calibrate; if you like a romance where the heroine has to grow up to deserve the ending, this is doing that on purpose.

My honest note: A four-star first half, a two-star conflict, and a community good enough to carry you between them. If poor communication or a lead who says something biphobic will end a book for you, this will. If you can ride out Cyn’s worst stretch, the friendship, the family and the heat are worth it.

Element	In A Little Kissing Between Friends
Central relationship	Cyn & Jucee — stud music producer and bisexual femme dancer, best friends to lovers
Core tropes	Friends to lovers, friends with benefits, butch/femme, jealousy, miscommunication, found family
Setting	Houston — a recording studio, the strip club Sanity and a close Black queer community
Heat level	4/5 — explicit open door, frequent scenes
Series	Standalone — complete arc, the couple commits by the end
Content notes	Explicit sexual content, alcohol use, a biphobic remark from a lead, sex work (portrayed positively), a passage some readers read as sexual manipulation

How Spicy Is A Little Kissing Between Friends?

A 4/5. romance.io places it in its “explicit open door” band, and reader reviews confirm the heat is a headline feature rather than garnish: “sexy as hell” is an entire four-star review, and even the two-star reviewers concede the chemistry in the steamy scenes. Kirkus singles out a gloriously sexy night between them. The scenes are frequent and include strap play, and The Lesbian Library praises a switch dynamic in which the stud bottoms — a real point of difference for readers who want butch/femme heat that is not strictly top/bottom.

The element worth knowing in advance is not a kink but a line of thought: late in the book, Cyn reflects that sex tends to make Jucee more agreeable, and at least two readers read that as manipulation and found it spoiled the reconciliation. No reviewer I found flags anything on the page beyond that. For contemporary romance at the same heat, Stud Like Her and Three Reasons to Say Yes sit in the same band.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you want a Black stud lead and a plus-size bisexual femme written as fully desirable, you like explicit heat with some role flexibility, you love a romance soaked in family and community, and you enjoy friends-to-lovers when it gets messy.

You may want to skip it if: you want a lead who is easy to root for throughout, you want steady romance over hot scenes and assumptions, a biphobic remark from a love interest is a hard line for you, or you need the miscommunication to be brief and organic.

In short: the best friendship and family on the page in a lot of recent sapphic romance, attached to a middle stretch that tests your patience with its heroine.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (September 2026)

There is no viral moment behind this book in 2026. What it has is a traditional-publishing launch: Harlequin’s Carina Adores released it in May 2024, it went out on NetGalley — many of the Goodreads reviews are from advance copies — and it picked up Publishers Weekly, Kirkus and a string of Substack and blog reviews. It now has 2,028 Goodreads ratings, a 3.63 average across 1,333 StoryGraph reviews and a 3.65 on romance.io. The distribution is the story: 57% of Goodreads ratings are four or five stars, but 32% sit at three. Several of the middling reviews come from readers who loved D’Vaughn and Kris Plan a Wedding, which averages 3.96 across 8,543 ratings, and came in expecting the same book.

The audiobook is a dual-narrator production from Harlequin, read by Lauryn Nichols and J. Shani Michaels and running 8 hours 36 minutes — one voice per heroine, which suits the alternating first-person chapters.

Prefer audio? Listen to A Little Kissing Between Friends on Libro.fm — the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The representation, first and by a distance — “Black,” “fat” and “stud” recur together in the positive reviews, usually with some version of “I’ve never seen this before.” Second, the family and community: Cyn’s family is the most-praised element in the whole review pool, including by readers who disliked Cyn. Third, the pro-sex-work stance and Jucee as a mother who refuses to stop being herself. Fourth, the heat, and Higgins’s voice — reviewers quote her lines because they are funny. StoryGraph’s crowd calls it lighthearted (69%) and funny (67%), 71% say it is character-driven, and 77% call the characters loveable. Publishers Weekly calls the take fresh and exciting.

What readers argue about and complain about: Miscommunication, above everything. It turns up in reviews at every star level, from the five-star readers who “wanted to shake Cyn” to the two-star readers who stopped caring about the couple, and Kirkus names it too. The mechanism: they agree they want more, then act as if that conversation never happened, and every setback is a walkout rather than a talk. Cyn is the second theme. Readers describe her as immature, messy or worse, and several felt she was in lust rather than love. Third, the biphobic remark, flagged by at least four independent reviewers, with a split over whether her apology was enough. Beyond that: an unclear starting point for the friendship, too many side characters early, and an ending one reader wanted 20 to 30 pages shorter. The genuine split is whether Cyn’s flaws are the point or the problem — The Lesbian Library argues real love stories are messy; the one-star review calls her behaviour gross.

The standalone question worth asking first: A Little Kissing Between Friends stands alone. Kirkus confirms the couple commits to each other with their community behind them, and readers who stuck with it report an emotionally happy ending — one teared up at it. No prior book is needed. If you want more of Higgins, D’Vaughn and Kris Plan a Wedding is the obvious next step and the stronger book by the numbers, sitting a quarter of a star higher with four times the ratings.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is A Little Kissing Between Friends a butch/femme romance?

Yes. Cyn is a Black lesbian stud and Jucee is a bisexual femme, and the dynamic is central to both the romance and the sex scenes. Readers repeatedly single out the stud representation as the reason they picked it up.

How spicy is A Little Kissing Between Friends?

A 4/5. romance.io rates it “explicit open door,” and readers treat the heat as a main draw, with frequent explicit scenes and a switch dynamic. It is steamier than D’Vaughn and Kris Plan a Wedding.

Does A Little Kissing Between Friends have a happy ending?

Yes. Cyn and Jucee commit to each other by the end, with their family and friends behind them. The road there is rocky, but the romance resolves.

Do I need to read D’Vaughn and Kris Plan a Wedding first?

No. It is a standalone with a different couple and a different setting. Many readers came to it from that book, and several found this one messier and more divisive.

Is there an audiobook?

Yes. Harlequin’s audio edition is narrated by Lauryn Nichols and J. Shani Michaels, one voice per heroine, and runs 8 hours 36 minutes. It is available on Libro.fm and Audible.

If You Loved A Little Kissing Between Friends, Read These Next

For more of Higgins at her most-loved, D’Vaughn and Kris Plan a Wedding gives you a Black stud/femme pairing with lighter conflict and a reality-show wedding premise. If the stud lead was the draw, Stud Like Her keeps a stud at the centre at the same explicit heat. And if friends-to-lovers is the trope you came for, All the Reasons I Need runs a friends-to-lovers engine at the same 4/5 heat.

For more in this register, browse our butch/femme lesbian romance guide or the full Book Reviews collection.

The Bottom Line

A Little Kissing Between Friends sets out to write a Black stud/femme friends-to-lovers romance with real heat and a whole community around it. The friendship is lived-in, the family is the best thing in the book, and the heat delivers. It is also stretched thin by a miscommunication cycle, weighed down by a lead whose worst moments some readers never forgive, and slow to land its ending. Whether that trade works depends on your patience with a flawed heroine — but if you want stud representation, a femme single mom who stays That Girl, and a romance that is sexy and funny before it gets messy, it is worth your time. Check A Little Kissing Between Friends on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, A Little Kissing Between Friends ranks as a hot, community-rich traditionally published stud/femme friends-to-lovers romance — vivid and genuinely funny, held back by miscommunication and a divisive lead, and best approached for the friendship, the family and the heat rather than for a smooth romantic arc.