An often heartbreaking page-turner.
An accident brings a former couple back together in McCoy’s debut novel.
Augustus “Auggie” Owens, an emergency room doctor in Cincinnati, immediately starts working on a Jane Doe who was hit by a car. While attempting to get her stabilized, he notices a very familiar scar on her neck and suddenly realizes that he knows his patient. It’s Elsie McCormick, a woman he met and fell in love with seven years ago. As Auggie stabilizes her and sends her off to the operating room, he thinks back on how the two of them met and how everything seemed so perfect before things fell apart. Elsie was in college at the University of Cincinnati, studying music performance, and he was in his third year of residency at the university hospital. Everything about their relationship seemed right, and they made concrete plans together: Elsie wanted to go to Nashville to start her music career, and Auggie was planning to apply to a hospital there. However, a fateful conversation with someone close to Elsie sends him reeling, and instead of talking things through with his girlfriend, he does what he thinks is best by bowing out of her life. But now that fate has brought them back together, Auggie can’t ignore how he feels any longer. Can Elsie forgive him? In this modern second-chance-at-love story, McCoy pens a sweet tale of romance that initially seems doomed, although the author takes care to give readers a pinprick of light at the end of the tunnel. The interactions between Auggie and Elsie when they’re younger are almost saccharine-sweet at times, with lines such as “You, my dear, have a handsome, strong boyfriend to protect you.” However, it effectively showcases how naïve young people can be regarding the world at large. As the sunshine of the past is juxtaposed with the darkness of the future, readers will yearn for a happy ending for the two main players.
An often heartbreaking page-turner.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63988-508-4
Page Count: 354
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2022
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
Light on plot and heavy on bolstering traditional gender norms as the ultimate goal for both men and women.
A Seattle woman meets a Chicago businessman as she flies home from a visit to a friend, and her small act of kindness blossoms into more.
Maisy Gallagher is barely making ends meet. With her father’s unexpected death a few years earlier, she dropped out of nursing school to help out in the family’s jewelry store, working with her uncle. Her older brother, Sean, also moved back home so he and Maisy could help their mother and their 10-year-old brother, Patrick. When Maisy offers a ride to a rude businessman who sat next to her on the plane, she’s just operating on the kindness her grandmother instilled in her. That businessman, Chase Furst, turns out to be an incredibly wealthy banker; he’s flown into Seattle to make funeral arrangements for his mother, to whom he hasn’t spoken in years. Sparks fly in this gentle and predictable romance that leans heavily on long-distance and class-divide tropes. As with many of the author’s books, Christianity and the characters’ reliance on God’s will—as they wait and see what happens next—play a large part, as do traditional gender roles where women cook, clean, and only work in paying jobs until they have children at home to take care of. The author does offer a lighter touch when it comes to the painful ways alcoholism can destroy family relationships, with an understanding of the regret that can weigh on every family member.
Light on plot and heavy on bolstering traditional gender norms as the ultimate goal for both men and women.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9798217091676
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
© 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.
