A charming contemporary romance take on The Office.
A debut workplace romantic comedy focuses on a young woman in Toronto.
Mardon opens her novel on a seemingly static note: Kelly Haggerty is stuck in a pleasant-enough rut. She works a dead-end job in the publicity department of a large cable TV conglomerate in downtown Toronto, endures a harried commute during the week, and steadily marches toward marriage to her likable, sensible boyfriend, Rob. Life in the run-up to Christmas keeps Kelly fairly busy, although she admits that downtime is dangerous: “Long days punctuated by the fact that I’d have to come back in the new year and begin my ‘new me’ by starting in the exact same position. No job change. No commute change. No timetable change. Nothing ‘new,’ actually.” She loves Rob, but her sister, Meghan, teases her that the real love of her life is her “work boyfriend,” Garrett, who toils in the company’s programming department and always manages to add some enjoyment to Kelly’s otherwise humdrum workday. Kelly is securely committed to Rob, but readers won’t need many pages to notice how often Garrett intrudes on her thoughts (“Garrett’s eyes sparkled as he cracked joke after joke, his slender frame always folding into the available seat beside me”). Kelly invites Garrett and his girlfriend, Jen, to the condo she shares with Rob because “the thought of going almost two weeks without being in his periphery made me feel kind of sick.” As these kinds of admissions pile up, Kelly begins to wonder about the course of her love life.
Mardon’s prose style is appropriately slangy and peppy throughout—this is an unflaggingly fun story with elements of the TV series The Office—even when her characters are facing some of life’s less-happy realities. The author foreshadows this situation early in the tale in a way romance fans will love. Kelly finds herself trapped on a long commute without the Margaret Atwood novel she’s pretending to enjoy and is forced to read the old Harlequin Romance her sister stuffed in her bag as a joke. But Meghan also provides a far more substantial bit of foreshadowing when Kelly works up the courage to ask her a disarmingly simple question about her marriage: “Are you happy?” Meghan’s answer is quietly devastating in its bleak frankness: “I don’t even think about it that way—honestly, I don’t. I think about what I’m building and what I have and where I want to go.” This should be all the warning a romance character needs, but Kelly is very winningly stubborn in holding on to the safe life she’s haphazardly built for herself. Along the way, Mardon does a wonderfully readable job of fleshing out her main and secondary characters—for instance, most readers will nod while recognizing many of her observations about contemporary work life. And naturally they’ll be rooting for Kelly to opt for love instead of “what I’m building.” When Kelly notes that “sometimes life doesn’t go in a straight line and doubling back makes sense,” the audience will be cheering.
Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781738945269
Page Count: 352
Publisher: re:books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
With captivating dialogue, angst-y characters, and a couple of steamy sex scenes, Hoover has done it again.
After being released from prison, a young woman tries to reconnect with her 5-year-old daughter despite having killed the girl’s father.
Kenna didn’t even know she was pregnant until after she was sent to prison for murdering her boyfriend, Scotty. When her baby girl, Diem, was born, she was forced to give custody to Scotty’s parents. Now that she’s been released, Kenna is intent on getting to know her daughter, but Scotty’s parents won’t give her a chance to tell them what really happened the night their son died. Instead, they file a restraining order preventing Kenna from so much as introducing herself to Diem. Handsome, self-assured Ledger, who was Scotty’s best friend, is another key adult in Diem’s life. He’s helping her grandparents raise her, and he too blames Kenna for Scotty’s death. Even so, there’s something about her that haunts him. Kenna feels the pull, too, and seems to be seeking Ledger out despite his judgmental behavior. As Ledger gets to know Kenna and acknowledges his attraction to her, he begins to wonder if maybe he and Scotty’s parents have judged her unfairly. Even so, Ledger is afraid that if he surrenders to his feelings, Scotty’s parents will kick him out of Diem’s life. As Kenna and Ledger continue to mourn for Scotty, they also grieve the future they cannot have with each other. Told alternatively from Kenna’s and Ledger’s perspectives, the story explores the myriad ways in which snap judgments based on partial information can derail people’s lives. Built on a foundation of death and grief, this story has an undercurrent of sadness. As usual, however, the author has created compelling characters who are magnetic and sympathetic enough to pull readers in. In addition to grief, the novel also deftly explores complex issues such as guilt, self-doubt, redemption, and forgiveness.
With captivating dialogue, angst-y characters, and a couple of steamy sex scenes, Hoover has done it again.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5420-2560-7
Page Count: 335
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
If you like your romance the darker the better, this one is for you.
A young mother returns to the gothic manor of her childhood to dust off the family secrets and face her old flame.
Maven Blackthorn hasn’t been home since her mom died under suspicious circumstances 12 years ago, but the death of her grandmother, Lorinda, forces her return to Solstice, Vermont. Maven’s daughter, Beatrix, has never seen where her mother grew up, but she quickly learns the Blackthorns have a reputation for witchcraft, largely fueled by a centuries-long feud with the powerful Croft family, whose heir apparent, Ronan, was Maven’s forbidden teenage love and “worst nightmare.” Maven hopes to bid farewell to her grandmother and visit with her aunts without running into Ronan, but he proves hard to avoid. Maven’s hatred for Ronan runs deep and she believes the feeling is mutual. From Ronan’s perspective, it’s clear their painful unraveling was full of misunderstandings. When Lorinda’s body goes missing from the funeral home, Maven is forced to accept Ronan’s help in discovering what happened. While Maven dives into her family history and the many unfortunate events befalling Blackthorn women, Ronan is forever in her ear, seducing her back to him. The push and pull of their romance feels immature, which isn’t helped by the first-person present narration. At times, it’s easy to forget Maven and Ronan aren’t still teenagers, until the erotica is punched up a thousand percent in the final third. Controlling lines from Ronan like “Don’t test my patience, woman” might read better if his perspective were explored more, though fans of Geissinger’s dark erotica, including Brutal Vows (2025), may not be fazed. Maven’s perspective dominates, and though her investigation into family lore and increasing paranoia are the most compelling arc, the million and one ways in which she threatens Ronan with physical violence—“What I really want to do is tie you to a tree, disembowel you with my bare hands, feed your guts to the wolves, and cut off your head”—is a bit one-note. Trigger warnings abound.
If you like your romance the darker the better, this one is for you.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781250379139
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bramble Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
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