A beautiful exploration of both grief and romance starring a lovably hilarious heroine.
Desperate for a baby, a single woman attempts to find a partner through a website for potential co-parents—but when feelings develop, things get complicated.
Lucie Yi knows she wants a child, but her journey to parenthood has been bumpy. After having a miscarriage, she suffers another devastating blow when her boyfriend cheats on her. She flees Singapore to work in New York City, where she can deal with her grief far away from reminders of her old life. But with her biological clock ticking louder and louder, Lucie knows she needs to act fast if she wants the baby she’s always dreamed of. The dating pool isn’t offering any potential fathers, but then she discovers Co-Family.com, a platform that one of her friends describes as “Tinder for would-be parents.” A platonic co-parenting situation is just what Lucie wants—she can’t deal with another heartbreak. When she meets Collin, she knows he’ll make the perfect father for her child. He’s willing to move to Singapore, where she wants to raise their child, and best of all, she doesn’t have any pesky feelings for him. But when she gets pregnant and they make the move back to her home country, things get complicated. Because of the intense social stigma around unwed mothers in Singapore, Lucie and Collin have to tell her parents that they’re going to get married. And then Lucie’s cheating ex, Mark, shows up. He claims he’s changed and wants to be together, but spending so much time with Collin has made Lucie realize that she might want other things. Should Lucie take the unconventional path with Collin and risk screwing up their platonic co-parenting situation, or should she fall into the safe comfort of Mark’s arms? Ho delicately balances grief, romance, and humor. There are many laugh-out-loud lines (including Lucie’s thoughts as her body changes during pregnancy), but Lucie’s sorrow over what she lost—both a baby and her imagined future—always rings true. This is best shown in a particularly touching scene in which Lucie attends a support group for grieving parents.
A beautiful exploration of both grief and romance starring a lovably hilarious heroine.Pub Date: June 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-42226-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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