Pot Shot by Laura Piper Lee Review — A Steamy, Hilarious Enemies-to-Lovers Rom-Com With Real Heart
- Joao Nsita
- 2 hours ago
- 10 min read
Pot Shot by Laura Piper Lee Review — A Steamy, Hilarious Enemies-to-Lovers Rom-Com With Real Heart
Let me tell you about the moment I fell in love with Pot Shot. It was not the opening chapter, though that was excellent. It was not the first scene between Nomi and Julian, though that crackled with exactly the kind of competitive, aggravated tension that makes enemies-to-lovers romance so deeply satisfying. It was a scene about two-thirds of the way through the book, quiet and unexpected, where Julian — the grumpy, rigid, perpetually judgemental doctor who has spent most of the novel being aggressively wrong about Nomi and everything she represents — sits down with her, truly sits down, and for the first time actually listens. Not to refute. Not to win. Just to hear.
And something in the book shifts. And something in Julian shifts. And I put the book down and said out loud, to the empty room: "Oh. He's gone. He's completely gone for her."
That is the mark of great enemies-to-lovers writing. Not the sparring — though the sparring in Pot Shot is spectacular. The moment the sparring stops being about the argument and starts being about the person on the other side of it. Laura Piper Lee finds that moment beautifully, and everything after it is deeply, satisfyingly earned.
Pot Shot is one of the most fun books I have read this spring. It is also one of the most thoughtful. That combination is rarer than it sounds.
What This Book Is About
Nomi Wyeth is a former valedictorian, a woman living with Crohn's disease, and — as everyone in her life seems determined to remind her — a pothead. She doesn't love that last label, primarily because it flattens the most important fact about her relationship with cannabis: it changed her life. After years of suffering with Crohn's and finding only partial relief from conventional treatments, cannabis gave Nomi her quality of life back. It reduced her pain, managed her symptoms, and gave her the energy and clarity to build a future she had nearly given up on imagining. Opening a boutique cannabis dispensary in Sparrow Nook, New Jersey is not just a business plan. It is a mission.
The problem is the building right next door. Or rather, the new tenant of the building right next door: Dr. Julian D'Angelo, former salutatorian to Nomi's valedictorian, a man she remembers as the smugly ambitious boy she spent four years of high school competing against. Julian has returned to Sparrow Nook under less than triumphant circumstances — a serious professional mistake has landed him on probation at the local medical practice, and he is trying to quietly rebuild his career while keeping a very low profile. A low profile that is immediately complicated by the woman next door, who is running a cannabis dispensary that he has exactly zero respect for and who appears to have zero respect for his lack of respect.
Their dynamic from page one is everything you want from this trope: sharp, funny, charged, and underwritten by an attraction that both of them are aggressively refusing to acknowledge. The business rivalry gives Lee a perfect structural backbone for the relationship to develop against, and she uses it beautifully — each new escalation of the professional conflict forcing Nomi and Julian closer together personally, each new round of arguing revealing something underneath the argument that neither of them is quite ready to face.
What makes Pot Shot special is the depth of its character work. Nomi is not simply "the fun one" — she is a woman who has fought hard for her health and her independence, who has built something from genuine conviction, and whose perspective on cannabis is rooted in lived experience. Julian is not simply "the grumpy one" — he is a man who made a mistake he cannot stop carrying, whose rigidity is a response to fear, and whose capacity for kindness has been buried under years of competitive armour. Watching these two people slowly excavate each other is one of the great pleasures of this book.
Author's Style and Craft
Laura Piper Lee writes with a fizzing, kinetic energy that keeps Pot Shot moving at a pace that makes it very difficult to put down. Her comic timing is sharp. Her dialogue is alive and specific — characters in this novel talk the way people actually talk, with rhythms and interruptions and subtext, and the exchanges between Nomi and Julian are genuinely funny in ways that feel spontaneous rather than constructed. She is also a skilled writer of physical attraction — the tension in scenes where Nomi and Julian are in close proximity, not yet willing to admit what is happening between them, is palpably real.
What impresses me most about Lee's craft is her integration of chronic illness into the story. Nomi's Crohn's disease is not a plot device. It is not a reason for sympathy or a narrative obstacle to be overcome. It is simply part of her life — present in some scenes, background in others, something she manages with the same practicality and humour she brings to everything else. This feels genuinely real, and it will mean a great deal to readers who live with chronic illness and rarely see themselves represented this accurately in romantic fiction.
Themes and Deeper Meaning
Pot Shot is a book about judgment — specifically, about the ease and habit of judging other people's choices through the lens of your own fear. Julian's opposition to cannabis is not simply cultural. It is rooted in a medical worldview that he has never truly examined. And his encounters with Nomi force him to do that examining, slowly and uncomfortably, in the way that genuine encounters with a different perspective always do. What Lee constructs is a love story that is also, at its core, a story about intellectual humility. About what it costs to admit that you were wrong and what it gains you when you do.
Nomi's arc is about something equally important: the right to have your lived experience taken seriously. She has been dismissed and diminished around her cannabis use for most of her adult life by people who see the label and not the person behind it. Her relationship with Julian — the former king of exactly that kind of dismissal — is her story of finally being truly seen. Not despite her choices but through understanding them.
These themes connect to something we explore a lot here at ThatLovePodcast.com — the idea that the best romance novels are about more than who ends up together. They are about who each person becomes through the encounter with the other. Our review of Score by Kennedy Ryan explored this beautifully in a very different context. Pot Shot arrives at the same truth from a completely different direction. If you love romance that makes you think as well as feel, our Romance Book Recommendations page has plenty more where this came from.
What This Book Gets Absolutely Right
The enemies-to-lovers dynamic is handled with extraordinary craft. The transition from rivalry to genuine emotional connection happens gradually and convincingly, without ever feeling rushed or unearned. Lee knows that this trope lives or dies on the quality of the "turn" — the moment the antagonism becomes something else — and she executes it perfectly.
Nomi's chronic illness representation is remarkable. It is present without being defining, accurate without being melodramatic, and handled with a specificity that will resonate powerfully with readers who live with invisible illness. This is how representation should work.
Julian's arc is genuinely satisfying. He is a difficult character to like at the start, and Lee earns your affection for him properly — not by softening him prematurely but by revealing what is underneath the difficulty, piece by piece, at exactly the right pace.
The small-town setting is wonderfully done. Sparrow Nook, New Jersey has personality and texture. The community dynamics — the gossip, the history, the stakes of two neighboring businesses going to war — feel lived-in and real.
The humour is consistent and never mean. Pot Shot is a funny book, and the comedy never comes at the expense of its characters' dignity. Lee is always laughing with Nomi and Julian, not at them.
Where the Book Could Have Gone Further
The professional conflict that brings Julian back to Sparrow Nook is slightly underexplored. It functions excellently as a reason for his humility and his need to keep his head down, but readers who want more specificity about what happened may feel it remains somewhat vague.
The resolution of the business rivalry feels slightly neat. The real-world complications of two adjacent businesses with competing interests in a small town are simplified somewhat in the final act. A touch more complexity there would have felt true.
A few supporting characters feel slightly underdeveloped. Nomi's community of cannabis advocates is briefly and warmly sketched but could have been given more space. They felt like people worth knowing better.
Books to Read If You Loved This One
Well Met by Jen DeLuca — An enemies-to-lovers romance set in a small town, full of snappy banter and a love story that builds beautifully from a genuinely antagonistic starting point. A perfect companion read.
The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang — Another romance that centres a protagonist navigating love through the specific lens of their neurology and lived experience, told with warmth and wit and real emotional intelligence.
Beach Read by Emily Henry — Two writers with opposing worldviews, forced into proximity, discovering that their differences are less definitive than they thought. If you love Pot Shot's intellectual sparring, Beach Read is your next read.
Who Should Read This Book
Pot Shot is for fans of enemies-to-lovers romance who want their trope executed with real craft and real character depth. For readers with chronic illness who want to see themselves reflected in a love story without being reduced to their diagnosis. For anyone who likes their romantic comedy warm and funny and politically engaged at the same time. For small-town romance readers looking for something a little more original than the standard blueprint.
For more books that hit this particular combination of funny, warm, and emotionally intelligent, head to our Sunlight by Devney Perry review and our broader What to Read guide.
Content warnings: chronic illness (Crohn's disease), cannabis use, some explicit content, competitive dynamics that occasionally feel hostile.
How This Book Made Me Feel
I want to talk about Nomi, because I think she might be my favourite thing about this book, and I am aware that is a high bar given how good Julian is and how funny the dialogue is and how satisfying the ending is.
Nomi is a woman who has had to fight for her own credibility her entire life — to be taken seriously as a person, to have her health experience believed and respected, to have her passion treated as something more than a joke. And reading her story, I felt that fight. I felt the exhaustion of it and I felt the rightness of someone finally, genuinely, seeing her.
There is a scene near the end where Julian does something that demonstrates how completely his perspective has changed — not dramatically, not with a grand speech, but through a specific, quiet act of solidarity. And I cried a little. Which surprised me, because I had been expecting to laugh, and I had been laughing. And then Pot Shot did what the best romantic comedies do: it got you while you were laughing. It landed the feeling in the space you opened up through the joy.
That is good writing. That is a book that knows exactly what it is doing.
Final Verdict
⭐⭐⭐⭐½ — 4.5 out of 5 stars
Pot Shot is Laura Piper Lee at her most confident and most generous — a rom-com that earns its laughs, earns its heat, and earns its happily-ever-after through the quality of its characters and the genuine truth of the relationship between them. Nomi Wyeth is a protagonist to love. Julian D'Angelo is a grumpy hero to fall for, properly and completely, by the time the last page turns. This is one of the most satisfying contemporary romances of the season.
About the Author
Laura Piper Lee is the author of Sweet Tea and Sympathy and Secondhand Smoke, beloved small-town romances known for their warmth, humour, and emotional intelligence. With Pot Shot, she has written her most ambitious and accomplished novel yet — one that is already garnering significant attention from indie booksellers across the country, landing on the Indie Next list for June 2026. Learn more about Laura and her work at laurapiperlee.com.
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FAQs
1. Do I need to know anything about cannabis or Crohn's disease to enjoy Pot Shot? Not at all. The novel provides all the context you need through Nomi's perspective, and neither topic is treated in a way that requires prior knowledge. The human story is completely accessible.
2. Is Pot Shot part of a series? No. Pot Shot is a standalone contemporary romance. It is set in a small town that fans of Lee's previous books may recognise, but it works completely independently.
3. How steamy is this book? Pot Shot has a moderate-to-warm heat level. There are romantic scenes, and the tension between Nomi and Julian is palpably physical throughout, but this falls within mainstream contemporary romance rather than explicit territory.
4. Is the portrayal of chronic illness accurate? Reviewers with Crohn's disease have praised the portrayal as one of the more accurate and compassionate depictions of the condition in fiction. Lee clearly did her research, and it shows.
5. Why did Pot Shot make the Indie Next list? The Indie Next List is compiled from nominations by independent booksellers across the United States. Landing in the top 25 for June 2026 reflects how genuinely enthusiastic booksellers are about recommending this novel to their customers. That kind of grassroots advocacy is one of the most reliable signals that a book is genuinely special.
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