A gentle, heartfelt story of the messy beauty of becoming.
In Leavy’s series installment, following After the Red Carpet (2024), a family of artists navigates love, legacy, and reinvention in an intergenerational tale of second chances and quiet revelations.
The author continues the story of Ella and Finn Forrester—Hollywood’s favorite enduring couple—by shifting the focus to their grown children, each on the cusp of personal transformation. Georgia, a rising actress, embarks on a career-defining film shoot in Iceland under the guidance of legendary director Jean Mercier. Her free-spirited nature is tested as she confronts both professional pressure and the lingering shadow of her parents’ fairytale romance. Meanwhile, her sister, Betty, a dedicated OB-GYN, wrestles with her aversion to intimacy and her growing connection to a close friend and colleague. Albert, the quiet artist of the family, explores his identity, and first love, while trying to shoulder the weight of being the son of an iconic movie star. As the kids forge their own paths, Ella and Finn prepare to renew their wedding vows, contemplating their own past and what it means to grow older together. Leavy’s prose is fluid, warm, and often poetic, capturing both the beauty of everyday moments and the emotional complexity of her characters’ inner lives. The novel seamlessly moves between perspectives, creating a full-bodied portrait of a clan at a crossroads, bound by love but separated by time and expectation. Although the stakes are largely emotional, the conflicts are rendered with care, revealing how even privileged lives involve quiet struggles. Fans of Leavy’s previous work will find familiar comfort in the close-knit dynamics, while new readers can easily enter the narrative here. Although some dialogue leans into sentimentality (“I still want to make life a grand adventure, but not without you”), the sincerity of the characters’ voices makes it feel earned. Leavy’s vision is ultimately hopeful, reminding readers that love—romantic, familial, and artistic—can be both grounding and liberating.
A gentle, heartfelt story of the messy beauty of becoming.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781647429485
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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