West’s adult debut is everything—vulnerable, spicy, funny, and squeal-out-loud romantic.
Can a meet-cute happen on a dating app?
At 27, Margot Hart has had her fair share of dating-app fails. As the assistant to Robert Bishop, Los Angeles’ top literary agent, all she wants is to work with romance novels, but her own last memorable date was three years ago with a software engineer named Oliver. After an awkward dinner and unforgettable make-out session in a car, Margot and Oliver continue to find each other on the apps and swipe right to joke about their terrible date and harmlessly flirt. Margot hasn’t been completely celibate since then; in fact, she’s been occasionally sleeping with her divorced yet emotionally unavailable boss. While her secret relationship with Rob weighs on her conscience, she can’t help craving this excitement in her otherwise lame dating life. Yet seeing Rob has its major lows—especially since she’s spent years without a promotion and opportunities to be an actual agent. When Margot finally works up the courage to confront Rob and he shoots her down, she takes a leap of faith and quits her job in hopes of starting her own agency. And if that wasn’t courageous enough, she decides to offer Oliver a second chance and turn their intermittent flirting into the real thing. It turns out that Oliver’s gotten better with age: He’s sweet, put-together, and undeniably hot, but Margot can tell something from his past is holding him back from taking their relationship to the next level. Can Margot balance the unknown trajectory of her career while falling hard for Oliver, or will she face yet another failure? YA author West has made a successful transition into adult fiction, maintaining all the charming, quirky qualities of YA while upping the romance factor. Margot is the likable sort of hot mess, and readers will empathize with her underdog sense of self-deprecation and root for her success. And of course, Oliver is a mix of swoon-worthy, shy, and sexy—every main character’s dream love interest.
West’s adult debut is everything—vulnerable, spicy, funny, and squeal-out-loud romantic.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781250349149
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Saturday Books
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
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 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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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