Too shallow to be shocking.
A young woman on the run from an abusive family falls in love with Lucifer.
The Originals are seven fallen angels, each representing one of the Seven Deadly Sins, who were cast out of heaven. Now Lucifer and his six siblings run New York, and Lucifer—pride—is the most elusive, despite being the CEO of Apollyon, a multinational conglomerate. Charlotte Bellefleur has recently escaped her fundamentalist Christian family in Topeka, Kansas, and fled to New York, landing an internship in the public relations department of Apollyon. When a body is found murdered in a club owned by one of the Originals, gossip and speculation targets Lucifer as the murderer. Apollyon’s PR wing has just begun to quell the rumors when someone breaks into Charlotte’s office and sends a private document she wrote about the situation to the press. Lucifer forces Charlotte into a fake engagement to distract the press and the two engage in a torrid affair. Meanwhile, Charlotte is receiving threatening text messages that she fears are coming from the family she left behind in Kansas. The start of a new series, Ballenger’s novel is a mishmash of tired romance tropes and archetypes. Lucifer reads as an immortal Christian Grey, a bland bad boy complete with a sex-dungeon playroom. He finds the prim, mousy Charlotte fascinating because she’s one of the few people who will stand up to him, and even though he can read the dark thoughts in most human minds, Charlotte’s is mysteriously closed to him. The ostentatious lifestyles of the Originals are valorized as more honest than the evil excesses of the fundamentalist church led by Charlotte’s father, while Lucifer is just a sad guy with a daddy complex looking for love.
Too shallow to be shocking.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781662528873
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
A heartfelt look at taking second chances, in life and in love.
Two struggling authors spend the summer writing and falling in love in a quaint beach town.
January Andrews has just arrived in the small town of North Bear Shores with some serious baggage. Her father has been dead for a year, but she still hasn’t come to terms with what she found out at his funeral—he had been cheating on her mother for years. January plans to spend the summer cleaning out and selling the house her father and “That Woman” lived in together. But she’s also a down-on-her-luck author facing writer’s block, and she no longer believes in the happily-ever-after she’s made the benchmark of her work. Her steadily dwindling bank account, though, is a daily reminder that she must sell her next book, and fast. Serendipitously, she discovers that her new next-door neighbor is Augustus Everett, the darling of the literary fiction set and her former college rival/crush. Gus also happens to be struggling with his next book (and some serious trauma that unfolds throughout the novel). Though the two get off to a rocky start, they soon make a bet: Gus will try to write a romance novel, and January will attempt “bleak literary fiction.” They spend the summer teaching each other the art of their own genres—January takes Gus on a romantic outing to the local carnival; Gus takes January to the burned-down remains of a former cult—and they both process their own grief, loss, and trauma through this experiment. There are more than enough steamy scenes to sustain the slow-burn romance, and smart commentary on the placement and purpose of “women’s fiction” joins with crucial conversations about mental health to add multiple intriguing layers to the plot.
A heartfelt look at taking second chances, in life and in love.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0673-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Jove/Penguin
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
PERSPECTIVES
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