A well-written novel sure to satisfy fans of small-town romances with a touch of danger.
In the first installment of Avon’s series, a young man struggles to establish a career and navigate a fraught new romantic relationship while reeling from the loss of his mother.
When readers first meet 30-year-old Mario, the protagonist is contemplatively smoking a cigarette as he waves to the mortician ferrying away his mother’s body. With his father long since out of the picture—even if Mario knows just where to find him—and his mother recently dead, Mario is now effectively an orphan. In his younger, better days, when he was living in the nice part of town, Mario was one of the cool kids at school, a football quarterback from a well-to-do family who harbored dreams of one day becoming a chef. Now, left by his parents’ divorce and mother’s death in dire straits and living quite literally on the wrong side of the tracks, those dreams seem like a thing of the past, no matter how much Mario knows his mother would want him to chase after his ambitions. Whether for his own satisfaction or to honor his dead mother, Mario humbles himself before his father by asking for a job at his restaurant, but he is insulted by the dishwasher position he’s offered. Mario soon lucks into a different opportunity: He meets Dean (friends call him “Dito”), owner of Dean’s Pizzeria, where he soon begins to work as a cook. Things are looking up, and soon Mario even meets a girl—Teresa, or, as friends call her, “Tess.” As if her beauty weren’t enough to attract Mario, Tess comes from the other, ‘better’ side of town and reminds him of his old life, when times were easier. But as in so many romances that seem, at first, too good to be true, there is trouble; Tess is harboring dark secrets that threaten to derail the hard-fought progress Mario has achieved for himself.
Avon’s novel is teeming with characters readers will feel they have seen before: an ambitious young man with a worthless, selfish father; a loving, long-suffering mother; a pretty girl with a checkered past. While at first readers may fear clichés abound, the author deftly leans on her command of setting to inform the characters, as seen here in a description of the apartment Mario’s mother left behind: “The story [she had been reading] without an audience had been eternally suspended, like a movie reel that snaps in the middle of the film’s denouement. On the bedroom dresser, a full bottle of baby powder was tipped on its side, spilling its guts. Clothes hung on their hangers; emaciated shells craving a human.” Avon’s evocative language carries the day here, and while there are passages that skirt overwriting (the phrase “feculent with impurity” appears in the novel’s opening sentence, for example), the vivid prose, in combination with the natural tension of a burgeoning love story pressurized by the secrets young lovers hide from one another, makes this novel stand out in a crowded field of suspenseful romance tales.
A well-written novel sure to satisfy fans of small-town romances with a touch of danger.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2021
ISBN: 9798533357043
Page Count: 174
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
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
A dark and twisty look at just how far one woman is willing to go to find inspiration.
A struggling writer finds an unexpected muse when a mysterious man shows up at her cabin.
Petra Rose used to pump out a bestselling book every six months, but then the adaptation happened—that is, the disastrous film adaptation of her most famous book. The movie changed the book’s storyline so egregiously that fans couldn’t forgive her, and the ensuing harassment sent Petra into hiding and gave her a serious case of writer’s block. Petra’s one hope is her solo writing retreat at a remote cabin, where she can escape the distractions of real life and focus on her next book, a story about a woman having an affair with a cop. When officer Nathaniel Saint shows up at her cabin door, inspiration comes flooding back. Much like the character from Petra’s book, Saint is married, and he’s willing to be Petra’s muse, helping her get into her characters’ heads. Petra’s book is practically writing itself, but is the game she’s playing a little too dangerous? Does she know when to stop—and, more importantly, is Saint willing to stop? Hoover is no stranger to controversial movie adaptations and internet backlash, but she clarifies in a note to readers that she’s “just a writer writing about a writer” and that no further connections to her own life are contained in these pages—which is a good thing, because the book takes some horrifying twists and turns. Petra finds herself inexplicably attracted to Saint, even as she describes him as “such an asshole,” and her feelings for him veer between love and hate. The novel serves as a meta commentary on the dark romance genre—as Petra puts it, “Even though, as readers, we wouldn’t want to live out some of the fantasies we read about, it doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy reading those things.”
A dark and twisty look at just how far one woman is willing to go to find inspiration.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781662539374
Page Count: -
Publisher: Montlake
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
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