The City of Light provides a beautiful backdrop for this stunning slow-burn romance.
A physician has to endure her ex-husband’s family—and an infuriatingly handsome best man—at her former sister-in-law’s destination wedding.
To hear Layla Bailey tell it, her divorce was amicable, but now she’s regretting her decision to stay friendly with her ex-husband Jamie’s family. When Emily, her former sister-in-law, all but begs Layla to attend her wedding in Paris, Layla can’t refuse. Then Jamie’s new girlfriend tags along, and there’s another member of the wedding party who’s even more distracting: best man Griffin Testa. He’s gruff, antagonistic, incredibly handsome, and visibly scarred in a way that hints at a traumatic past, and he also knows how to get under Layla’s skin with little more than a look. After a girls’ night out results in Emily getting cold feet, Griffin confronts Layla, demanding to know what she’d said to talk the bride out of the wedding. While Griffin is strangely determined to make sure this event goes off without a hitch, Layla doesn’t want to create a disruption for the family she once belonged to, either. The two reluctantly team up to calm any doubts that Emily and Michael—Griffin’s best friend—might be having, and as they’re increasingly forced into each other’s orbit, Griffin offers to be a buffer so Layla doesn’t have to face Jamie alone. Clayborn’s latest romance takes big swings, both in its approach to character and to some of the genre’s most well-trodden tropes—Griffin is likened to a dark fae prince at several turns in a way that feels like a teasing wink at romantasy. The book’s leads are both wounded in different ways, but as the story progresses and their chemistry blossoms, they lower the emotional walls they’ve spent years constructing in favor of embracing more vulnerability and honesty. The result is a tremendous love story that’s never overshadowed by its immersive Paris setting but poignantly accentuated by it, proof that Clayborn only gets better with every book.
The City of Light provides a beautiful backdrop for this stunning slow-burn romance.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780593819371
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 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 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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