An idyllic tale of the pitfalls and positives of growing up.
A coming-of-age story about a group of high school soccer stars navigating their first year of college after they all decide to attend the same Midwestern school.
Readers tag along with the boys as their parents drop them off at college and the freshmen adjust to dorm life, practice soccer and even drink a beer—or four—at a frat party. Readers are privy to the boys’ first steps into adulthood in the ’60s. Best friends Barrett and Paxton steal the show: Barrett has always been the star athlete dating the star cheerleader, while Paxton plays the father figure, the practical sidekick, still well-liked but not quite stepping out of the shadows. But that all changes during the boys’ freshman year at Bainbridge University in Indiana. It’s a school where the girls are pretty, football reigns supreme, and not everything is as it seems. Poppoon has a knack for painting vivid scenes—from a night out drinking Rolling Rock at Fitzgerald’s and listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival to game day on the pitch, with perfect descriptions of every last pass, shot and goal. However, the play-by-play of nearly every maneuver during a game can become a bit tedious, even for the most fanatical of fans. Regardless, the book picks up momentum toward the middle, as the chapters—one for each day the boys have been away at college thus far—shorten and the boys deal with very adult issues. Together, the group of friends, which grows to include a few beloved girls, navigates the ups and downs of college, teamwork, illness and even death. For any reader who’s played soccer at a school dominated by football, this shot on goal scores.
An idyllic tale of the pitfalls and positives of growing up.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-1475928785
Page Count: 384
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.
Childhood friends, almost-sweethearts, a misunderstanding, and a funeral.
Blair Lang and Declan Renshaw were best friends who went on one date before a disagreement and an accident sent them in different directions after high school. Now Blair is back from college to be with her great-aunt Lottie, who’s dying, and to support her single mother in small-town Seabrook, California. Finding a job at a coffee shop puts her in the path of her former boyfriend, since he turns out to be its owner. Can the two get past their mistakes? The novel uses the popular second-chance romance trope, but Pham fails to energize it through interesting characters. Blair’s grief over her great-aunt’s death and her plan to help her mother are overshadowed by internal monologues about her feelings, the way her friends aren’t paying attention to her, and the novel she plans to write. Declan’s distinguishing characteristic, besides being a former high school quarterback, is his skill at building birdhouses. Unsurprisingly, the couple doesn’t have much chemistry; when they embrace, their “bodies meld like…memory foam.” The wooden characters, unusual word choices (“conglomerate of pedestrians,” “litany of plants”), and odd turns of phrase (“tension melting from his eyebrows like butter melting in a warm pan”) are almost enough to obscure the lack of plot development. What passes for stakes is easily defused when Blair comes into an inheritance that saves her from working as a consultant at Ernst & Young in New York—so she can write a romance novel.
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781668095188
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
Rowell delivers the requisite happily-ever-after, but it doesn’t quite satisfy.
A second-chance romance from the author of Slow Dance (2024) and the Simon Snow Trilogy.
Cherry is fat. There are other things to know about Cherry, but this fact is essential to how she sees herself and—she knows—essential to how other people see her. And now that her husband’s hugely popular webcomic is a movie, she not only has to endure people confusing her with the character that’s based on her, but also the knowledge that the actor playing this character is wearing a fat suit. This pain is exacerbated by the fact that her marriage is over. It’s at this rock-bottom moment that her college crush reenters her life…This is a book about being fat, and Rowell does a great job of depicting what internalized fatphobia looks like. “Cherry was so used to thinking about being fat, she hardly even noticed that she was doing it. She was so used to thinking about being fat, she never thought about it.” Observations like this will resonate with a lot of readers, as will Cherry’s complicated feelings about weight-loss drugs. This is also a romance and, as a romance, it’s kind of all over the place. It’s totally realistic for Cherry to wonder if Russ—the guy from college—never pursued her because of her weight. This is a conflict that feels true. What’s less believable is the way he reacts when he sees a trailer for Cherry’s husband’s movie. It’s clear that he didn’t get that this movie was going to be a blockbuster. In short, Russ freaks out, and it’s not at all clear why. As for Cherry’s husband, the way she feels about him at the beginning of the book is totally disconnected from the way she feels about him in the novel’s latter half. It’s normal to have complicated feelings about the end of a marriage, of course, but there’s no emotional throughline to help the reader understand why Cherry’s feelings change so dramatically.
Rowell delivers the requisite happily-ever-after, but it doesn’t quite satisfy.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9780063380264
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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