A love story with a lot of bark but little bite.
On the eve of her wedding, a woman runs into the teenage love who broke her heart.
Sam has her life all figured out. She’s got Jack, her perfect doctor fiance; a nice Manhattan apartment; and a job she’s good at (even if she might have just messed it up). Now she’s headed out to her family’s Long Island beach house to tour a potential wedding venue and finally introduce Jack to the kind of summers she grew up with, even though they might be a little less straight-laced than he’s used to. What she wasn’t anticipating was that Wyatt—the boy next door she was in love with all through her childhood and whom she hasn’t seen since she was 17, when he broke her heart—would be there, cheerfully enmeshed back in her family. Long-forgotten feelings bubble under the surface as Sam must figure out if the life she’s created is the one she really wants. The book jumps back and forth in time, starting in the present and flashing back chronologically through Sam and Wyatt’s growing-up years, relationship, and breakup. This means there’s a lot of buildup for the inevitable split, and it’s impossible for the breakup not to feel like a letdown. The story also feels lopsided in that the modern-day sections (with one small exception) are narrated by Sam while the flashback sections alternate between Sam’s and Wyatt’s points of view. While that structure does let the reader understand why Wyatt did what he did as a teen, it’s an odd contrast with the mysterious Wyatt of the present. The book would have been stronger if it had either fully stayed with Sam’s journey or followed both leads. Interesting side characters are left disappointingly half-baked to focus on fairly standard protagonists.
A love story with a lot of bark but little bite.Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9780593544969
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2023
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: today
A smart, steamy romance.
Tomforde’s sports romance pairs boardroom power plays with dugout drama.
As the youngest and only female owner of a Major League Baseball team, Reese Remington is used to pressure. Even though Reese is the granddaughter of the Windy City Warriors’ former owner, the men around her still question her position; she’ll “most likely have to work twice as hard and make [the] club’s success twice as noticeable to have any hope of being viewed as the right person to operate this team.” It doesn’t help that the franchise is bleeding money, the result of her grandfather’s hands-off approach in the years before his retirement. Reese must use her razor-sharp intelligence and fierce business sense to not only prove herself in a role in which the public is eager to see her fail, but also to make unpopular financial decisions to get the team out of the red. Enter Emmett Montgomery, a former All-Star turned field manager whose priorities lie firmly with people rather than profit. A man devoted to his team and his adopted child, Emmett has long since closed the door on romance, despite gentle nudging from his loved ones. His empathetic team-first mentality puts him immediately at odds with Reese’s pragmatic agenda, and with his contract up at the end of the year, Emmett worries he’ll be on the chopping block if he speaks out too much. Told from the perspectives of the leads, the novel gives equal page time to Reese and Emmett. Their concerns––the scrutiny Reese must endure as a woman in a male-dominated industry, and Emmett’s worries over his contract renewal––are tangible and add a sense of urgency to their every decision. While the novel includes some unavoidable exposition dumps to orient readers, it more than compensates by establishing clear stakes and a sense of momentum from the outset. The narrative successfully introduces credible barriers to the romance, which largely follows recognizable genre beats. The baseball setting is also used effectively, with the season-long arc mirroring the couple’s romantic and professional journeys.
A smart, steamy romance.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781649379795
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Entangled: Amara
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
