A spirited, resonant love story about new loves and new beginnings.
In Lee’s debut novel, a 20-something woman rediscovers love and a sense of herself while visiting a new city.
When Naomi Kita-Fan’s fiance, Seth Ray, was transferred to Shanghai, she excitedly went with him. She gave up her life in New York City to be with the man she loved, but she was only in her new home for a month before she discovered that he’d been unfaithful to her. The engagement was called off, and Naomi now finds herself heartbroken, unemployed, and alone in a foreign country, sleeping on a sofa bed in a hastily rented studio apartment. She can barely speak Mandarin, but she decides to stay in the city anyway—a metropolis that’s full of beauty and excitement and unlike anywhere she’s ever been before. Before long, she’s standing and looking out at the city from a glass-floored platform with a handsome restaurateur, “beguiled with the verticality of towers, with the kaleidoscopic skyline that resembled Tomorrow Land, everything gleaming and shiny and new, promising a future that was limitless.” Later, she meets Dante Ouyang, a Chinese architect who lived abroad in England until recently, and she feels an immediate connection with him. Naomi’s whirlwind affair with Dante, however, may prove as beguiling—and as full of emotion—as her affair with Shanghai itself. Lee’s prose is wonderfully descriptive, equally attuned to the rhythms of her characters and the city: “Naomi felt like wearing her sunglasses on her walk to work this morning, even though there were no sun rays….The sky was a dreary gunmetal hue, the fog of pollution looming ominously, lingering at eye level and in her nostrils.” Naomi is a complex and compelling creation, and the supporting cast members—including her friends Joss and Tay—are all richly detailed. The book effectively marries her youthful self-exploration with the exploration of an urban environment with which many readers may be unfamiliar. The conclusion is satisfying, but readers will likely be left with a profound desire to see the real-life Shanghai.
A spirited, resonant love story about new loves and new beginnings.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-913891-01-5
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Balestier Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A powerfully strong romance for readers who like their love stories full of torment and passion.
Best friends confront feelings for each other when they take a honeymoon trip together.
Francesca Gardiner and George Saint James have always been best friends—just like Jo and Laurie from Little Women, which they both love. Frankie has a big, complicated family and George was the boy next door who’d moved in with his eccentric grandmother. Their friendship survived childhood, awkward teenage years, and living together as young adults without ever venturing into the romantic—well, except for one kiss, but they don’t talk about that. When Frankie gets engaged to an older professor named Nate, George isn’t happy and a huge fight ensues. Despite his misgivings, George shows up to be her best man, but Nate leaves Frankie right before the wedding with only a cryptic letter. Devastated, Frankie goes to a friend’s house to recuperate, but her honeymoon is already planned and paid for—so she decides to travel to Tofino, a picturesque town on the coast of Vancouver Island, with George taking Nate’s place. Frankie wants to fix her friendship with George, but now that they’re in a romantic suite in a beautiful location, things are more complicated than ever. She’d always thought a relationship would be a bad idea, but she’s slowly beginning to realize they’ll never be able to go back to being kids. Maybe the only way forward involves forging a new kind of relationship. Fortune, the author of romances like This Summer Will Be Different (2024), returns with another love story full of longing and intense angst. The many allusions to Little Women are charming, and Frankie is a delightfully headstrong, feisty character. She and George have explosive chemistry, and Fortune manages to make the “will-they-or-won’t-they” nature of their relationship feel like life-or-death stakes.
A powerfully strong romance for readers who like their love stories full of torment and passion.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9780593953242
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fun, positively frothy friends-to-lovers romance.
While on her sister’s wedding cruise, a woman enlists her childhood best friend for help as she attempts to woo her longtime crush.
JoJo Burton is bad at love. After she leaves her terrible fiancé, Pearce Richmond, at the altar, she’s convinced she might never settle down. But during her sister’s wedding, which is being held on an eight-day cruise to the Bahamas and Cozumel, she and her family concoct a plan that will help her seduce her recently divorced childhood crush, Finn Turner. The two of them once shared a blindfolded kiss that might have ruined JoJo for all other men, and she’s never forgotten it. But then JoJo’s best friend, Cooper Watts, shows up. Cooper and JoJo were inseparable as children but didn’t talk for years after she got engaged to Pearce. She doesn’t know why he suddenly disappeared on her, but it doesn’t matter—he’s here now, and she needs him to help her get Finn to reenact that long-ago kiss. But after she and Cooper share a cabin, get thrown together for every wedding week activity, and even engage in the classic friendly flirting meant to make another man jealous, JoJo starts to realize that Finn might not be the man she’s been waiting for, after all. Center keeps things light, focusing on humor even when the subject matter veers into family drama. JoJo and Cooper find themselves caught up in the sort of tropes that are catnip for romance fans—he takes care of her when she has a sunburn, for instance, and they participate in a slow-dance contest. As Center reveals in an author’s note at the beginning, “Spoiler: This book will end well.” The destination may not be a surprise, but the journey is a delight.
A fun, positively frothy friends-to-lovers romance.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9781250408051
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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