A perfect blend of steamy angst and family drama makes for a love triangle that’s impossible to put down.
A matchmaker must choose between following fate’s wishes or choosing her own path.
Cassia Park is in the business of love. As a matchmaker for One & Only, she helps love stories come true every day. But One & Only isn’t a regular matchmaking service, and that’s because the Park women have been able to read faces (and see past lives) for hundreds of years, from their roots in Korea to their current lives in Los Angeles. Their matches have an unprecedented 100% success rate because of their magical (and very secret) abilities. Cassia, however, has been waiting to meet the one she calls her “fated” for 10 years, and all she has to go on is his name—Daniel Nam. Cassia is eager to start a family, but as her 40th birthday approaches, she’s beginning to panic that she may never find Daniel. When a bike accident meet-cute introduces her to 28-year-old Ellis Yang-Cohen, she has a weekend fling that she knows won’t amount to anything—after all, Ellis is way too young for her and he isn’t her fated. But their connection is immediately strong, and they keep bumping into each other. Then she meets his boss, whose name is (surprise!) Daniel Nam. Torn between the man she loved in a past life and the man she’s drawn to in this one, Cassia must learn how to follow her heart and decide her own future. In her adult debut, Goo creates a delightfully dramatic love story that will keep readers on their toes. Ellis and Daniel are both good people and solid matches for Cassia, which makes her inability to decide between them feel sufficiently agonizing. Cassia’s close-knit family includes a wonderful bunch of elderly relatives who add to both the humor and the heartache.
A perfect blend of steamy angst and family drama makes for a love triangle that’s impossible to put down.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9798217181162
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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
With captivating dialogue, angst-y characters, and a couple of steamy sex scenes, Hoover has done it again.
After being released from prison, a young woman tries to reconnect with her 5-year-old daughter despite having killed the girl’s father.
Kenna didn’t even know she was pregnant until after she was sent to prison for murdering her boyfriend, Scotty. When her baby girl, Diem, was born, she was forced to give custody to Scotty’s parents. Now that she’s been released, Kenna is intent on getting to know her daughter, but Scotty’s parents won’t give her a chance to tell them what really happened the night their son died. Instead, they file a restraining order preventing Kenna from so much as introducing herself to Diem. Handsome, self-assured Ledger, who was Scotty’s best friend, is another key adult in Diem’s life. He’s helping her grandparents raise her, and he too blames Kenna for Scotty’s death. Even so, there’s something about her that haunts him. Kenna feels the pull, too, and seems to be seeking Ledger out despite his judgmental behavior. As Ledger gets to know Kenna and acknowledges his attraction to her, he begins to wonder if maybe he and Scotty’s parents have judged her unfairly. Even so, Ledger is afraid that if he surrenders to his feelings, Scotty’s parents will kick him out of Diem’s life. As Kenna and Ledger continue to mourn for Scotty, they also grieve the future they cannot have with each other. Told alternatively from Kenna’s and Ledger’s perspectives, the story explores the myriad ways in which snap judgments based on partial information can derail people’s lives. Built on a foundation of death and grief, this story has an undercurrent of sadness. As usual, however, the author has created compelling characters who are magnetic and sympathetic enough to pull readers in. In addition to grief, the novel also deftly explores complex issues such as guilt, self-doubt, redemption, and forgiveness.
With captivating dialogue, angst-y characters, and a couple of steamy sex scenes, Hoover has done it again.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5420-2560-7
Page Count: 335
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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