An uplifting, if overly sweet, story about the healing power of love.
In Leavy’s romance, a new couple must confront past traumas without destroying their fledgling relationship.
The book opens as 38-year-old Tess Lee meets Jack Miller for the first time while enjoying a drink alone at a bar. Their connection is instant and intense. After leaving the bar together they quickly become inseparable, and before long they’re professing their love to each other and sharing deep secrets. Tess reveals on their first night together that she was the victim of physical and emotional abuse as a child. Jack, in turn, tells Tess about the horrors he witnessed in his government positions fighting terrorism. They quickly introduce each other to the important people in their lives (“Do you think it will seem strange to our friends, how deeply we feel about each other after such a short time?”), which is when Jack learns that Tess, rather than being just another run-of-the-mill writer (as she’d implied), is actually an incredibly well-known and bestselling author. Seeing the opulence in which she lives, he’s floored, and worries that he might not be enough for her. Though Tess is able to quell his concerns, she soon suffers a traumatic experience and retreats into herself in a way that makes her doubt she can ever be sufficiently whole enough to meet the needs of her new love. While the novel moves surprisingly quickly at the beginning, with the characters sharing personal secrets and profound declarations when they are little more than strangers, the jarring pace does even out before the book’s halfway point. The narrative would have benefited from additional setting details to help ground readers and counterbalance the preponderance of dialogue. While the story flirts with the idea of Tess suffering from disordered eating as a result of her difficult past, the issue is portrayed inconsistently and is never resolved. Even so, there is an alluring hopefulness to the work as the author portrays the characters exploring each other and themselves as they struggle to recover from difficult pasts. Beyond the romantic themes, the narrative does manage to tackle several other difficult issues with grace, ranging from grief and self-doubt to self-love and second chances.
An uplifting, if overly sweet, story about the healing power of love.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781647428549
Page Count: 224
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A surprisingly sensual sports romance.
A collegiate diver and swimmer secretly pursue kink together, and risk falling in love along the way.
Scarlett Vandermeer is struggling. Despite a successful recovery from the injury that almost ended her Stanford diving career, she hasn’t been able to get her head together, and it’s affecting her performance. Plus, she’s trying to stay focused on getting into medical school. A relationship would be out of the question. By comparison, Lukas Blomqvist is a swimming idol, a record-breaker who wins medals as easily as breathing, and Scarlett has long been convinced he would never look in her direction—until one fateful night when a mutual friend lets slip that they have something unexpected in common: Scarlett likes to be submissive in the bedroom, while Lukas prefers to take a dominant approach. Now, they both know a big secret about each other, and it’s something neither of them can stop thinking about. It’s Lukas who suggests they have a fling—purely physical, just to take the edge off, so Scarlett can get out of her own head and stop overthinking her dives. Initially, their arrangement is easy to stick to, but the more time they spend together, the more Scarlett starts to realize that what she feels for Lukas is more than physical attraction. Complicating the situation is the fact that Scarlett’s friend Penelope Ross used to go out with Lukas, and the longer Scarlett keeps mum about her true feelings for him, the more difficult it is to keep the situation hidden from another person she really cares about. While Scarlett and Lukas’ relationship does begin as a physical one, their deeper psychological connection takes a little too long to emerge amid all the other storylines, resulting in a somewhat rushed resolution. However, Hazelwood’s latest is proof of the depth and maturity that has emerged in her writing over the years, and it highlights her embrace of sexier, more emotional elements than were present in her original STEMinist rom-coms.
A surprisingly sensual sports romance.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593641057
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A wallowing, emotionally wrenching family drama that leaves little time for romance.
Two people with bad luck in relationships find each other through a popular Reddit thread.
Emma Grant and her best friend, Maddy, are travel nurses, working at hospitals for three-month stints while they see the country. Just a few weeks before they’re set to move to Hawaii, Emma reads a popular “Am I the Asshole” Reddit thread from a Minnesota man who thinks he’s cursed—women he dates find their soulmates after breaking up with him, and the latest one found true love with his best friend! Emma has had a similar experience, which inspires her to DM the man and commiserate. She’s delighted by her witty, lively interactions with software engineer Justin Dahl, and is intrigued when he suggests that if they date each other, maybe they’ll each find their soulmate afterward. Emma upends the Hawaii plan and convinces Maddy to move to Minneapolis for the summer so she can meet Justin in person. The overly complex setup brings Emma and Justin together and the two hit it off, with Justin immediately falling head over heels for Emma. Jimenez then pivots to creating romantic roadblocks and melodramatic subplots centering on each character’s family of origin. Justin’s mother is about to serve six years in prison for embezzlement, which means Justin must move back home to care for his three much younger siblings. Emma was traumatized by her own mother for much of her childhood, left to fend for herself and eventually abandoned in the foster system. When her mother shows up in Minnesota, Emma must face her traumatic childhood and admit that she has prioritized her mother’s well-being over her own. There is little time devoted to Emma’s painful efforts to heal herself enough to accept Justin’s love, which leaves the novel feeling unsatisfying.
A wallowing, emotionally wrenching family drama that leaves little time for romance.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781538704431
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Forever
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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