An often sweet love story, but one that lacks focus.
In Marshall’s LGBTQ+ romance novel, a middle-aged, newly retired woman falls in love with a woman 20 years her junior amid a messy divorce and a deadly pandemic.
It’s 2022, and 55-year-old Amanda “Mitch” Mitchell is a newly retired surgical oncologist living in Santa Monica, California. As a teenager, she and her best friend, former Wall Street executive LaShantay Biggs, made a pact to “unplug at fifty-five” and are now getting used to early retirement. Mitch has long been separated from her wife, so the two friends decide to dive back into the dating pool together, where Mitch meets Tara Debarre, a 35-year-old pediatric specialist. They hit it off right away, despite Mitch’s reservations about their age gap, and their relationship kicks the novel into gear. There’s not a lot of conflict in the story’s first half, which creates an issue in which the narrative seems to go out of its way to avoid anything that would make the story too heavy. Eventually, though, Tara moves forward with a previous plan to get pregnant through artificial insemination, and Mitch worries that she might become a burden to the much-younger Tara as she gets older. However, these reasonable fears are quickly sidelined by the struggle of Mitch trying to divorce her wife, Joliet. This leads to Joliet victimizing Tara by outing her pregnancy at work and throwing a brick through her car’s window. Mitch declares war to get even. However, that plotline is almost immediately put aside when, out of left field, a pandemic caused by the (fictional) Chimeravirus sends the world back into Covid-style lockdowns and causes Tara return to her hometown of Sonoma, California, to have her baby. This turn, and the pacing issues earlier in the novel, make for a rocky read as the novel darts between various themes and dramatic situations without ever solidly landing on any of them. Still, the relationship between Mitch and Tara is consistently endearing throughout.
An often sweet love story, but one that lacks focus.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2025
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
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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