A deeply felt, passion-filled, dual-timeline love story.
A New York City brownstone brings together a pair during two different stages of their lives.
When her TV show gets canceled, Los Angeles based working actor June Wood finds herself between gigs hoping to make ends meet. An intriguing but vague email implores her to visit New York City with news about the brownstone she used to rent. She returns to her former home and is shocked to learn that not only has she inherited the multimillion dollar place from her former landlord, but she co-owns it with her old roommate, Adam Harper, a man she lived with for six years but hasn’t seen since she left five years ago. It’ll take a month for all the paperwork to get in order, and, in the meantime, June and Adam are once again living under the same roof. If there’s any hope of repairing their relationship, they’ll have to look back at the events that led them to this point and confront their unresolved feelings. The narrative jumps between the present and past, both through June’s engaging first-person narrative. In the past timeline, June dreams of being on Broadway and Adam aspires to become a great chef. They barely know each other when they become roommates but over time become best friends with the possibility of more constantly lingering as they grow together and support each other through the highs and lows of careers, family, and other relationships. This slow-burn romance is propelled by the question of what happened to tear them apart, and while that reveal doesn’t entirely land, all the small, tender moments between June and Adam are what will captivate readers. Debut author Richard crafts emotionally complex characters full of yearning, and the lush New York setting adds extra appeal.
A deeply felt, passion-filled, dual-timeline love story.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2025
ISBN: 9798217093656
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Dell
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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
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
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