A romance that celebrates community and love in all its forms.
A corporate lawyer quits her job and temporarily relocates to Miami.
On a company retreat in Miami, Liliane Lyon expected to be recognized for her hard work on closing a major deal. When a newcomer is given the credit instead, Lily quits on the spot. Corporate law never made her happy, and she decides to take the opportunity to find herself. Rather than return to New York, Lily rents a studio in the Icon, a stunning art deco building on Miami Beach, just for the summer. Her across-the-hall neighbor is Benedicto Romero, a professor who’s won a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship for his translation work. Ben is fresh off a breakup and Lily is only in Miami for a few months, so they decide to stay friends rather than act on the strong attraction between them. After discovering that they both post about romance novels on a social media site devoted to books, they form a cozy two-person book club. Soon, their co-written reviews become an online sensation, and they eventually start a podcast focused on romance and relationships. Eventually, other Icon residents join Ben and Lily’s poolside romance book club, creating a tightknit community. Despite Lily and Ben’s insistence that they’re just friends, their neighbors are convinced that they’d make the perfect match. Ben and Lily’s romance is sweet, but the strength of this charming, low-angst novel is its focus on all kinds of relationships, including friends, neighbors, and family. Although the inclusion of documentary-style elements—social media posts, podcast and YouTube transcripts, journal entries, etc.—is meant to capture the escalating emotional connection between Ben and Lily, at times it does the opposite.
A romance that celebrates community and love in all its forms.Pub Date: July 15, 2025
ISBN: 9781335903341
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Canary Street Press
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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
Rowell delivers the requisite happily-ever-after, but it doesn’t quite satisfy.
A second-chance romance from the author of Slow Dance (2024) and the Simon Snow Trilogy.
Cherry is fat. There are other things to know about Cherry, but this fact is essential to how she sees herself and—she knows—essential to how other people see her. And now that her husband’s hugely popular webcomic is a movie, she not only has to endure people confusing her with the character that’s based on her, but also the knowledge that the actor playing this character is wearing a fat suit. This pain is exacerbated by the fact that her marriage is over. It’s at this rock-bottom moment that her college crush reenters her life…This is a book about being fat, and Rowell does a great job of depicting what internalized fatphobia looks like. “Cherry was so used to thinking about being fat, she hardly even noticed that she was doing it. She was so used to thinking about being fat, she never thought about it.” Observations like this will resonate with a lot of readers, as will Cherry’s complicated feelings about weight-loss drugs. This is also a romance and, as a romance, it’s kind of all over the place. It’s totally realistic for Cherry to wonder if Russ—the guy from college—never pursued her because of her weight. This is a conflict that feels true. What’s less believable is the way he reacts when he sees a trailer for Cherry’s husband’s movie. It’s clear that he didn’t get that this movie was going to be a blockbuster. In short, Russ freaks out, and it’s not at all clear why. As for Cherry’s husband, the way she feels about him at the beginning of the book is totally disconnected from the way she feels about him in the novel’s latter half. It’s normal to have complicated feelings about the end of a marriage, of course, but there’s no emotional throughline to help the reader understand why Cherry’s feelings change so dramatically.
Rowell delivers the requisite happily-ever-after, but it doesn’t quite satisfy.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9780063380264
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
SEEN & HEARD
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