A steamy trio of rom-com stories that is best savored slowly.
When a summer heat wave in New York City causes an extended blackout, three friends each find herself stuck with the last person she anticipated.
Best friends Ria Preston, Vanessa Ríos, and Alison Cahill have a plan: They'll beat the heat by fleeing the city for a much-needed girls trip. All they have to do is make it through the next few hours of their respective evenings. Art restorer Ria is attending a benefit at the Met, theater critic Vanessa is taking a front-row seat at a Broadway play, and Alison has a scheme to throw a wrench or two into an aspiring magician's act. But there are unforeseen complications to events that would otherwise go off without a hitch, including the plot twist of a sudden blackout that rolls through Manhattan and leaves them each stranded with an unexpected party. For Ria, it's the chance to finally get to know her longtime crush, Wall Street consultant Vic Albright, the man she's always admired from a distance but has been too shy to approach. Vanessa is forced to confront someone from her past—actor Mateo Garza—whose career faltered after she gave his last play a bad review. And Alison's connection to magician Nicholas Finn runs much deeper than the rest of his audience realizes—years ago, in college, he broke her heart, and she's never fully moved on. The conceit of a blackout offers a delicious forced-proximity element to each novella, although the friendship throughline is somewhat weakened by taking place through only a handful of text-based interactions. Ultimately, the romance is where these stories truly ignite, with varying levels of angst and heat.
A steamy trio of rom-com stories that is best savored slowly.Pub Date: May 25, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4967-3267-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Kensington
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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
Light on plot and heavy on bolstering traditional gender norms as the ultimate goal for both men and women.
A Seattle woman meets a Chicago businessman as she flies home from a visit to a friend, and her small act of kindness blossoms into more.
Maisy Gallagher is barely making ends meet. With her father’s unexpected death a few years earlier, she dropped out of nursing school to help out in the family’s jewelry store, working with her uncle. Her older brother, Sean, also moved back home so he and Maisy could help their mother and their 10-year-old brother, Patrick. When Maisy offers a ride to a rude businessman who sat next to her on the plane, she’s just operating on the kindness her grandmother instilled in her. That businessman, Chase Furst, turns out to be an incredibly wealthy banker; he’s flown into Seattle to make funeral arrangements for his mother, to whom he hasn’t spoken in years. Sparks fly in this gentle and predictable romance that leans heavily on long-distance and class-divide tropes. As with many of the author’s books, Christianity and the characters’ reliance on God’s will—as they wait and see what happens next—play a large part, as do traditional gender roles where women cook, clean, and only work in paying jobs until they have children at home to take care of. The author does offer a lighter touch when it comes to the painful ways alcoholism can destroy family relationships, with an understanding of the regret that can weigh on every family member.
Light on plot and heavy on bolstering traditional gender norms as the ultimate goal for both men and women.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9798217091676
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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