A charming and sweet look at the importance of breaking your own rules and taking a chance on love.
A London coder with a long list of relationship deal breakers finds out that true love might appear in the unlikeliest place when she’s paired up with her work nemesis.
Marina Spicer is behind schedule. All she wants is a safe, predictable relationship with the kind of man who wants to have kids, get a dog, and live happily-ever-after. But when her high school sweetheart dumps her, saying they want different things, she realizes she’s 30 years old and her biological clock is ticking louder every day. Enter Dealbreakers, an app she designed to help other efficient women weed out the men who just won’t work. It pulls data from other dating apps, then allows users to leave notes explaining what their date was really like—thus allowing people like Marina to avoid wasting time on someone who doesn’t fit their criteria. But the app isn’t Marina’s only work—her day job is at a website called LetsGO that helps people book interesting activities, and she wants to take on more responsibility. And then copywriter Lucas Kennedy shows up. He has tattoos, he smokes, he curses—all serious deal breakers for Marina. He’s also seemingly hellbent on annoying her. Unfortunately for her, they get paired up on a project, competing for the promotion Marina so desperately wants. The two of them have to test out date ideas, and as they try dancing, ax throwing, and an escape room, Marina starts to wonder if there’s more to Lucas than she suspected. Marina and Lucas have undeniable chemistry, and their dates provide them with plenty of opportunities to showcase their bickering banter as they get closer, both physically and emotionally. While the walls Marina built around her heart make sense, it’s satisfying to watch her open up—both to the possibility of love and to the risk that things might not go according to plan.
A charming and sweet look at the importance of breaking your own rules and taking a chance on love.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2023
ISBN: 9780593422533
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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 fun, positively frothy friends-to-lovers romance.
While on her sister’s wedding cruise, a woman enlists her childhood best friend for help as she attempts to woo her longtime crush.
JoJo Burton is bad at love. After she leaves her terrible fiancé, Pearce Richmond, at the altar, she’s convinced she might never settle down. But during her sister’s wedding, which is being held on an eight-day cruise to the Bahamas and Cozumel, she and her family concoct a plan that will help her seduce her recently divorced childhood crush, Finn Turner. The two of them once shared a blindfolded kiss that might have ruined JoJo for all other men, and she’s never forgotten it. But then JoJo’s best friend, Cooper Watts, shows up. Cooper and JoJo were inseparable as children but didn’t talk for years after she got engaged to Pearce. She doesn’t know why he suddenly disappeared on her, but it doesn’t matter—he’s here now, and she needs him to help her get Finn to reenact that long-ago kiss. But after she and Cooper share a cabin, get thrown together for every wedding week activity, and even engage in the classic friendly flirting meant to make another man jealous, JoJo starts to realize that Finn might not be the man she’s been waiting for, after all. Center keeps things light, focusing on humor even when the subject matter veers into family drama. JoJo and Cooper find themselves caught up in the sort of tropes that are catnip for romance fans—he takes care of her when she has a sunburn, for instance, and they participate in a slow-dance contest. As Center reveals in an author’s note at the beginning, “Spoiler: This book will end well.” The destination may not be a surprise, but the journey is a delight.
A fun, positively frothy friends-to-lovers romance.Pub Date: May 19, 2026
ISBN: 9781250408051
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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