An engaging historical time-travel romance featuring a love that spans the ages.
In this first book in a planned duology, a young woman falls for a man with a painful past and travels back in time to save their love.
Nineteen-year-old Florence Contini is desperately searching for a job. But in New York City in 1936, in the midst of the Great Depression, so are a great many others. Luckily, her friend Jim delivers newspapers and brings her the job ads early so she can get a head start on finding a position. Seeing that the mysterious new owner of the Oak’s Place estate is in need of a secretary, Florence eagerly applies and is hired to start the next day. She heard that her employer was a retired British general and assumed that he’d be older, but Alexander Sterling is only in his 40s and quite handsome. Upon their first meeting, his eyes seem familiar to her, and even Alex asks if they’ve met before. If that wasn’t odd enough, Florence keeps having dreams about him—as a younger man. Currently, Alex has a mysterious illness keeping him in bed for days at a time. But what really pains him is a heartbreak he suffered years ago when his wife and infant child died. Florence knows he has secrets, but his questions about her past, and his interest in the bracelet she’s had since birth, have her intrigued—and when she get a supernatural chance to delve further into his past, she can’t pass it up. Over the course of this book, Maidana presents a historical romance that spans lifetimes and timelines. She provides an intriguing take on the idea of soul mates and eternal love, but what really makes the story original and worth a read is the time travel aspect, which is well handled. The story starts a bit slowly, but overall, the prose has an old-world feel that fits perfectly with the time period. The mysteries are intriguing enough to keep the reader guessing and eager to find out more, and the cast of secondary characters, mostly longtime employees of Alex’s, have their own secrets and motives that add to the suspense.
An engaging historical time-travel romance featuring a love that spans the ages.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68046-736-9
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Satin Romance
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A heartfelt look at taking second chances, in life and in love.
Two struggling authors spend the summer writing and falling in love in a quaint beach town.
January Andrews has just arrived in the small town of North Bear Shores with some serious baggage. Her father has been dead for a year, but she still hasn’t come to terms with what she found out at his funeral—he had been cheating on her mother for years. January plans to spend the summer cleaning out and selling the house her father and “That Woman” lived in together. But she’s also a down-on-her-luck author facing writer’s block, and she no longer believes in the happily-ever-after she’s made the benchmark of her work. Her steadily dwindling bank account, though, is a daily reminder that she must sell her next book, and fast. Serendipitously, she discovers that her new next-door neighbor is Augustus Everett, the darling of the literary fiction set and her former college rival/crush. Gus also happens to be struggling with his next book (and some serious trauma that unfolds throughout the novel). Though the two get off to a rocky start, they soon make a bet: Gus will try to write a romance novel, and January will attempt “bleak literary fiction.” They spend the summer teaching each other the art of their own genres—January takes Gus on a romantic outing to the local carnival; Gus takes January to the burned-down remains of a former cult—and they both process their own grief, loss, and trauma through this experiment. There are more than enough steamy scenes to sustain the slow-burn romance, and smart commentary on the placement and purpose of “women’s fiction” joins with crucial conversations about mental health to add multiple intriguing layers to the plot.
A heartfelt look at taking second chances, in life and in love.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0673-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Jove/Penguin
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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