Bridget & Gabe Are Not Okay Review — Is It Worth Reading?

Verdict: A warm, funny-in-places Arthurian sequel that takes its characters’ trauma seriously and earns its Kirkus star, held back by a slow, miscommunication-heavy middle and a sapphic romance that shares the spotlight with an M/M one.

Best for: Readers who loved Gwen & Art Are Not in Love and want to see what happens after the happy ending, who are happy with a dual-couple ensemble rather than a single F/F two-hander, and who can live with a quieter, sadder book than the first.

Heat level: ★☆☆☆☆ (1/5 — young adult, closed door; no romance.io steam band)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.8/5 — a 4.04 Goodreads average across 1,181 ratings, with an advance-copy-heavy review base and a consistent complaint about pace)

Tropes: Second chance, dual POV, quest road trip, found family, Arthurian retelling, lady knight, royal court, miscommunication, mental-health recovery, queer ensemble.

Bridget & Gabe Are Not Okay by Lex Croucher is the second Camelot Disasters book, a young adult historical queer rom-com from Wednesday Books set in an irreverent, anachronistic Camelot, and it opens where most romances stop: after the battle is won, the crown has changed heads and both of book one’s couples have quietly fallen apart. Lady knight Bridget Leclair can no longer win a joust. Newly crowned Gabriel can no longer get through a council meeting.

It has a 4.04 average across 1,181 Goodreads ratings, a starred Kirkus review, and “Instant New York Times Bestseller” on the publisher’s own copy. The low-star share is tiny. The interesting split sits inside the three-star reviews, among readers who liked these characters in book one and wanted something different from this. Both halves of that split are worth understanding before you start.

What Is Bridget & Gabe Are Not Okay About?

Shelve this as a YA historical fantasy rom-com: Amazon puts the reading age at 13 to 18 and files it under Teen LGBTQ+ Romance, Teen Romantic Comedy and Teen Historical Romance. The history is a costume, not a constraint: Arthurian legend played for jokes and feelings, with closed-door romance and emotional rather than political stakes.

This site’s readers need to know one thing up front. The title pair are not a couple. Book one belonged to Gwen and Arthur. This one belongs to the two people they fell for: Bridget, the knight in a relationship with Gwen, and Gabe, Gwen’s brother and Arthur’s boyfriend. The book alternates between their POVs, so half of it is a sapphic romance in trouble and half is an M/M one. Gwen is not a narrator here, so you see the F/F relationship only from Bridget’s side of the cracks.

What Makes This Sapphic YA Historical Rom-Com Work

The mental-health writing: Panic attacks, PTSD after battle, grief and burnout are the book’s real subject. Even its harshest reviewers concede they are handled with care, and Kirkus and School Library Journal both single this out.
Bridget’s slump: A champion knight who keeps forfeiting is a sharp way to write depression into a world of tournaments, and readers who loved Bridget in book one say this gives her the depth she was missing.
The found family: The ensemble from book one is back, and reviewers keep naming the group’s warmth, not either couple, as what carried them through the heavy chapters.
Humour that survives: Lighter than book one, but present. School Library Journal calls the banter still top-notch, and 61% of StoryGraph readers tag it funny.
A second-chance arc inside a sequel: Watching two established couples fail and rebuild is a rarer YA pleasure than watching them meet.

Book Synopsis

Camelot survived. That was supposed to be the hard part. Instead, the months since the battle have unpicked everything it settled. Gabriel has inherited the throne far sooner than anyone planned, and the boy who was always going to be king turns out to be someone who hides in store cupboards between council sessions, waiting for his heart to stop racing. He cannot bring himself to tell Arthur how bad it is. So he does what seems kindest and lets Arthur go.

Bridget Leclair has the opposite problem: everyone already knows something is wrong with her, because it happens in public. The knight who once beat every man in the lists now walks away from tournaments without lifting her sword, and she cannot explain why even to herself. She and Gwen were the couple who were supposed to make it, and the distance between them is widening in ways neither of them is naming.

Then the kingdom starts talking. There are stories of a grail, of a beast nobody can catch, of a knight dressed in green, and a new king has every reason to be seen taking them seriously. So Gabe and Bridget, along with Gwen, Arthur and the rest of the court’s resident disasters, set out on the road to visit the realm’s towns. Whatever they find on that journey, they are travelling with the people they have hurt most. The open question is whether either of them can say what is actually wrong before the quest, or their own heads, gets them first.

My Review

The best thing about this book is its nerve. Croucher had a beloved, bestselling rom-com and could have written a victory lap. Instead she wrote the morning after: what a battle does to the teenagers who fought it, and what a crown does to a boy with an anxiety disorder. The panic attacks read as panic attacks rather than plot devices, and even the two-star reviewers concede it works.

The second strength is how the dual POV is used. Bridget and Gabe are struggling with versions of the same thing, and alternating between them makes the parallel visible without anyone having to say it. Bridget especially benefits. In book one she was the dashing object of Gwen’s crush; here she is a person. StoryGraph readers back this up: 94% say the character development is strong, and 97% call the characters loveable.

Where it struggles is momentum, and this is not my gripe alone. It is the most consistent thread in the critical reviews. Readers call it slow, repetitive and meandering, and one suggests the story would have made a better novella. The quest is loose, and several reviewers feel it exists mainly to keep the characters in one place. Around that sits the second complaint: the couples spend much of the book not talking to each other, and readers who dislike miscommunication call it out by name.

For this site specifically there is a third note. The F/F romance is genuinely central, but it is half the book, not all of it. Gwen is not a narrator, and several reviewers felt she and Arthur were left in limbo. If you are here for the sapphic storyline, you are getting a strong one at half the page count you might expect.

One expectation to reset: the publisher sells it as the funny follow-up, and readers repeatedly report that it is not that, or not mainly. StoryGraph’s top mood is emotional, at 78%, ahead of funny at 61%, and “sadder than the first” is the most common comparison in the reviews. If the comedy of book one is what drew you, calibrate. If you wanted these characters taken seriously, this is the book that does it.

My honest note: A brave, kind sequel that trades book one’s sparkle for depth and loses some pace in the exchange. If you need your rom-coms brisk and your couples talking, this will test you. If you loved these four and want to see them grow up, it is worth the slower road.

Element	In Bridget & Gabe Are Not Okay
Central relationship	Bridget Leclair & Gwen (F/F) and Gabe & Arthur (M/M): two established couples split and rebuilding; dual POV from Bridget and Gabe
Core tropes	Second chance, quest road trip, found family, Arthurian retelling, lady knight, miscommunication
Setting	An irreverent, anachronistic Camelot in the months after the battle that ended book one
Heat level	1/5 — young adult, closed door
Series	The Camelot Disasters book 2 of 2 — read Gwen & Art Are Not in Love first; no cliffhanger; no third book announced
Content notes	Homophobia and lesbophobia, panic attacks and PTSD, grief and death of a parent, misogyny, violence, kidnapping, hate crime, religious bigotry, injury

How Spicy Is Bridget & Gabe Are Not Okay?

A 1/5, and that is a description rather than a criticism. romance.io has no entry for it, which is normal for young adult titles and itself tells you the book is not being catalogued as adult romance. Amazon gives the reading age as 13 to 18. On StoryGraph, sexual content appears exactly once across hundreds of crowd-sourced warnings, at the minor level, and no reviewer I found describes anything on the page beyond kissing and longing.

The thing worth flagging in advance is not spice but weight. Homophobia is the most-tagged warning on StoryGraph, and panic attacks, grief and violence follow close behind, so a reader expecting book one’s lightness should know the emotional register has dropped. For the same closed-door YA band elsewhere on this site, Cinderella Is Dead and Death Card both sit at 1/5.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you finished Gwen & Art Are Not in Love wanting more of the whole gang, you value mental-health stories that are honest without being bleak, you enjoy a found-family ensemble on the road, and you are comfortable with a queer romance cast split between F/F and M/M.

You may want to skip it if: you want a single sapphic couple at the centre of every chapter, miscommunication is a dealbreaker trope for you, you lose patience with a loose plot and a slow first third, or you are coming for book one’s comedy and want the same ratio of jokes to tears.

In short: a deeper, sadder, slower sequel that rewards readers invested in these characters and tests anyone who isn’t.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (October 2026)

This book is not finding readers through a viral moment. I found no organic BookTok surge in search and no Reddit discussion of it, though Reddit’s own search was unreachable from my end this time. It is finding them through book one. Gwen & Art Are Not in Love sits on more than 34,000 Goodreads ratings, and the sequel arrived with a ready-made audience, a launch the publisher bills as an instant New York Times bestseller, and unusually full trade coverage for YA: a Kirkus star, plus positive reviews from Booklist and School Library Journal and a most-anticipated nod from Autostraddle. One caveat on the reader numbers: a large share of the written reviews, about half of the most visible ones, come from advance-copy readers. Only about 2% of Goodreads ratings sit at one or two stars, so the average is not obviously inflated, but it is worth knowing whose voices you are hearing.

The audiobook is a real option here. It is narrated by Theodora Taylor and Kishore Walker and runs 12 hours and 2 minutes in the Bloomsbury edition (the US Macmillan edition runs about the same). Three separate listeners single out the narration for praise.

Prefer audio? Listen to Bridget & Gabe Are Not Okay on Libro.fm — the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The mental-health portrayal comes first and most consistently. PTSD, anxiety, panic attacks and grief are the words readers reach for, and praise for how they are handled appears even in reviews that otherwise grumble. Kirkus goes furthest, calling the book “Bloody fantastic” and singling out its handling of trauma. Next come the characters themselves: StoryGraph’s 97% loveable figure is about as close to unanimous as that platform gets. Then the found family. A minority actively prefer it to book one, and one StoryGraph reviewer says the writing has noticeably improved. That is worth noting, because it runs directly against the loudest complaint.

What readers argue about and complain about: Tone, above everything. The single most repeated observation in the critical reviews is that this is a heavier, sadder book than its predecessor; about half the three-star reviews I read raise it, and most of the two-star ones do too. Pace is the second theme. Readers call the middle slow and repetitive and the quest a loose excuse to keep everyone together. Third: miscommunication. The couples’ failure to talk is the book’s engine, and readers who dislike that trope say so pointedly. One calls it “one miscommunication trope after another.” Smaller recurring notes: abrupt off-page breakups at the opening, Gwen and Arthur sidelined, and a book one reread needed to find your footing. Opinions genuinely divide on the tonal shift itself. Several readers call it the natural and earned next step, while others find it jarring.

The series question everyone should ask first: this is book two, and it does not stand alone. Read Gwen & Art Are Not in Love first; several reviewers wished they had reread it. The good news is that the sequel resolves. Readers describe a satisfying ending for both couples, at least one calls it a fitting close to a duology, and nobody reports a cliffhanger. Amazon lists the series as two books. Some readers are openly hoping for a third with all four POVs, but none has been announced as of October 2026. The sequel rates higher than book one, 4.04 against 3.94, from a self-selected audience.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Bridget & Gabe Are Not Okay a sapphic romance?

Partly. The book alternates between Bridget and Gabe, and Bridget’s storyline is an F/F romance with Gwen, while Gabe’s is an M/M romance with Arthur. Bridget and Gabe are not a couple with each other.

Do I need to read Gwen & Art Are Not in Love first?

Yes. This is book two of the Camelot Disasters and opens after both couples have already broken up. Several readers say they wished they had reread book one before starting.

Does Bridget & Gabe Are Not Okay end on a cliffhanger?

No. Readers describe a satisfying ending for both couples, and none report a cliffhanger. No third book has been announced as of October 2026.

How spicy is Bridget & Gabe Are Not Okay?

A 1/5. It is young adult fiction for ages 13 to 18, the romance is closed door, and romance.io has no steam rating for it.

Is it as funny as the first book?

Not quite. The humour is still there, but readers consistently describe this as a heavier, sadder book focused on panic attacks, PTSD and grief. StoryGraph readers rank it emotional before funny.

Is there an audiobook?

Yes. It is narrated by Theodora Taylor and Kishore Walker and runs about 12 hours. Listeners praise the narration.

If You Loved Bridget & Gabe Are Not Okay, Read These Next

If the Arthurian quest is the draw, For the Love of the Quest runs an Arthurian treasure hunt through a fully sapphic adult historical romance, still behind closed doors. If Bridget is your favourite, Her Pretty Knight puts a lady knight at the centre of an adult F/F romantasy with more heat and more yearning. And for another YA book that takes a fairy tale apart with queer anger instead of jokes, Cinderella Is Dead shares the closed-door heat at a much faster pace.

For more in this register, browse our guide to the best lesbian YA books or the full Book Reviews collection.

The Bottom Line

Bridget & Gabe Are Not Okay is a sequel that refuses to coast. The mental-health writing is careful and humane, Bridget and Gabe become fuller characters than book one allowed, and the found family gives the heavy chapters somewhere warm to land. It is also slower than it needs to be, leans hard on couples not talking, and gives its sapphic romance half the book rather than all of it. If you already love these characters, this is the book that takes them seriously. Check Bridget & Gabe Are Not Okay on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, Bridget & Gabe Are Not Okay ranks as a big-hearted queer YA sequel: tender and brave about trauma, held back by pace and a shared romantic spotlight, and best approached for the characters’ recovery rather than for a sapphic rom-com.