Elliot will leave you savoring every last word.
A professional restaurant critic and an amateur food blogger put their taste buds to the test in Elliot’s delectable romance.
Julie Zimmerman is hungry, and not just for food. Aside from taste testing the flavors of New York City as up-and-coming influencer JulieZeeEatsNYC, Julie is hungry for more—she wants to be a professional food critic. Her dream is to write for a major newspaper like the New York Scroll, but until then, she works as a personal assistant for Mr. Decker, a retired television executive. Julie can’t help but despise the lucky few who break into the food critic business, especially since they're mostly wealthy white men. Cue Scroll newbie Bennett Richard Macalester Wright, a Dartmouth grad and perfect avatar of the privileged demographic Julie loathes. When Julie and Bennett meet at a food festival, they clash like oil and water. After their filmed altercation goes viral, the Scroll encourages Bennett and Julie to review restaurants together in order to “[continue] these conversations” about disparities in the food industry. Yet the more time they spend together, eyes closed in ecstasy over a mouthwatering meal, the more Julie and Bennett can’t deny that they feel something more than hatred for one another. Fans of Elliot’s previous novel, Sadie on a Plate (2022), will adore the cameos from familiar characters and welcome the enticing way the author describes every bite: “The sheer pleasure as he closed his eyes while chewing the duck, rosy and meaty in the middle and crispy-skinned on the outside, in one perfect bite with pickled and fresh beets. I didn’t have to look hard. It radiated out of his very soul.” Elliot leaves your stomach grumbling and your heart pounding, and it’s hard to discern what’s more delicious: the elaborate dishes or the couple's simmering chemistry.
Elliot will leave you savoring every last word.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-593-33573-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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