Beautifully intimate and inventive.
Can you fall in love—sight unseen—with someone you’ve never met, based on a shared love of music and language?
Greg—aka Gory Cat—is a zinester, which means he’s part of a community of writers who self-publish their work in small pamphlets and distribute them at festivals and punk shows and through the mail. His zine is called Long Walks on the Beach, and each issue is full of fictional personal ads based on different themes—one issue has ads written as if by characters in songs, “imagining what Jack might have been seeking after Diane refused to run off to the city with him”; another has personal ads written by objects in a movie. Greg secretly buries one “real” ad in each issue—that is, one ad describing the sort of connection he might be looking for himself. A mysterious reader named M begins writing to Greg, each time responding to the ads in which Greg reveals his most vulnerable parts, even as Greg moves into his aunt’s house to figure out his next step. M turns out to be Morgan, a cellist who helps Greg peel back the layers on the work he might want to do and what it might look like for him to fall in love—even with someone as ephemeral and unknowable as a pen pal. Set in the early-to-mid 2000s, this book is a love letter to a very specific queer punk scene that invites readers in by referencing titles and bands they can explore on their own. The letters between Morgan and Greg do a lot of heavy lifting here, but author Terry’s excellent prose and character development keep the story moving. It’s more a slow-burn love story about falling for someone who really sees you than it is about specifically queer relationships, and the lack of sex may leave some readers wanting.
Beautifully intimate and inventive.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9798998759659
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Generous Press
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
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 cleverly titled, cozy SF romance that marks Thorne as a writer to watch.
After purchasing a dilapidated, century-old starship called the Destitute, Torian Razner discovers that the moss covering it is, in fact, a deeply sarcastic sentient computer with abandonment issues.
Torian’s sister, Celise, is dying. Determined to save her life by getting her to a distant planet with air she can breathe, Torian ignores her former captain Amelia Perrosk’s warning that it’s an impossible task (along with any romantic feelings she might have for Amelia). Using the only ionite bars she has to her name, Torian purchases an ancient, moss-covered alien starship that appears to be on its last legs, so to speak. She hardly expected the moss to be a sentient computer or for it to hold a century-old grudge against its former alien captain. Moss quickly proves itself to be acerbic, intelligent, and rightly angry after being having been left behind for 100 years by its former captain. The two form a reluctant and surprising alliance, Torian proving to Moss that not all captains are “dog-turd fungus,” and they both gradually evolve into the best versions of themselves, human or otherwise. It’s obvious from the early pages that Thorne has crafted a story tailored to fans of Becky Chambers’ Monk & Robot series and Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries. Falling somewhere between the two, this is a delightful mashup of romance, found family, and a touch of violence as Moss grapples with its feelings about its former captain and the unexpected kindness that Torian shows. Sweet without being overly saccharine, it’s a book for readers who want the adventure that comes with the vastness of outer space without its harsher realities.
A cleverly titled, cozy SF romance that marks Thorne as a writer to watch.Pub Date: July 7, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414144
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bramble Books
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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