Standard-issue romantasy with a clever build toward a sequel.
A princess enters a neighboring kingdom’s contest to marry its prince, but she’s secretly on a spy mission to find a hidden weapon.
Aella is a princess in disguise. When she was a child, her father sent her away from the palace to be raised in the Aviary, a secret espionage/military organization within the kingdom of the Sorrows. Very few people in the Aviary know Aella’s true identity, so when she completes her training and is given her first mission, she can’t share with her friends just how well-suited she is for the job. Aella is to travel to the nation of Eretria for the “trials,” in which women compete for the prize of marrying Prince Keres. The others on the mission believe Aella will be in disguise as the Sorrows’ mysterious princess, who is never seen publicly, but of course Aella is really in disguise as herself. The Aviary wants Aella to win the trials and stay in Eretria as the queen, spending the rest of her life as a spy. The rest of her cohort is being sent to retrieve a mysterious weapon that Eretria has hidden somewhere in the palace. As if being in disguise twice over isn’t enough for Aella, she also has to navigate the surprisingly deadly trials themselves—as well as the growing certainty that marriage to Prince Keres might be a fate worse than death. If the layers of secrecy aren’t confusing, it’s because their primary purpose is to serve as fun romantasy tropes rather than a real plot. The same goes for the added layer of confusion when Aella and her friends receive new bird-themed names as members of the Aviary: Giving the heroine an extra name like “Starling” and a sexy love interest called “Raven” reads more like an aesthetic flourish than something truly necessary to Aella’s character arc. Still, the seasonally themed kingdoms and some later developments leading to the next installment are well done, and compared to many of her more purple colleagues, Otto is relatively restrained when it comes to melodramatic imagery.
Standard-issue romantasy with a clever build toward a sequel.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9798217153824
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2026
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
© 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.
