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
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
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