A steamy love story with memorable characters despite occasional distracting asides.
In Bell’s romance, an NFL player and his unlikely best friend fall in love.
Sawyer Jackson, a 25-year-old Miami Mavericks tight end—a position likely chosen for its double-entendre—is convinced that beautiful, hilarious, 21-year-old Kennedy Quinn, a student at the Berklee College of Music, has “gifted [him] a FastPass to the friend zone.” Kennedy reciprocates Sawyer’s attraction, but an ex-boyfriend, Boston College’s star quarterback Hunter Sterling, recently cheated on her. She isn’t ready to move on, so she and her “Hottest Friend,” Sawyer, maintain a flirty but platonic connection. The narrative then shifts abruptly to three years and four months later, when Sawyer is about to join the big-league New York Cougars—for which Hunter is the quarterback—and still nursing his crush on close friend Kennedy. She’s moved to New York City with musical-theater aspirations and a powerful agent, William Abreu, to match. Sawyer wants to get out of “Kennedy’s friend zone and into her heart’s end zone,” but a number of factors could jeopardize their romance: Sawyer’s playboy history; Kennedy’s sexy new roommate, Andrew; a “morality and ethics clause” in Sawyer’s Cougars contract that could keep the couple apart; and neither party's wanting to ruin their current relationship. As Sawyer and Kennedy’s attractions heats up, the author heightens the internal and external stakes for the characters, making for a page-turning read. Sawyer’s voice is full of “colorful verbiage,” as Kennedy puts it in one of her point-of-view sections, and often-funny metaphors: Kennedy’s laugh is described by Sawyer as a “cock-hardening ballad” in narration; he also calls his teammate Declan Walsh an “anti-wingman” and opines that calling men’s boxers “panties” is “basically verbal castration.” However, italicized asides sometimes distract from the narrative: After a heartfelt confession, for instance, Kennedy breaks out of the moment to think, “Whoa. That’s a lot to unpack.” Both Sawyer’s and Kennedy’s perspectives are laugh-out-loud funny, but the author occasionally dips into cliché: “She didn't wear a drop of makeup; she didn’t need it.” That said, the leads each gain depth as their relationship progresses.
A steamy love story with memorable characters despite occasional distracting asides.Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2022
ISBN: 9798985418453
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 2, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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: yesterday
A smart, steamy romance.
Tomforde’s sports romance pairs boardroom power plays with dugout drama.
As the youngest and only female owner of a Major League Baseball team, Reese Remington is used to pressure. Even though Reese is the granddaughter of the Windy City Warriors’ former owner, the men around her still question her position; she’ll “most likely have to work twice as hard and make [the] club’s success twice as noticeable to have any hope of being viewed as the right person to operate this team.” It doesn’t help that the franchise is bleeding money, the result of her grandfather’s hands-off approach in the years before his retirement. Reese must use her razor-sharp intelligence and fierce business sense to not only prove herself in a role in which the public is eager to see her fail, but also to make unpopular financial decisions to get the team out of the red. Enter Emmett Montgomery, a former All-Star turned field manager whose priorities lie firmly with people rather than profit. A man devoted to his team and his adopted child, Emmett has long since closed the door on romance, despite gentle nudging from his loved ones. His empathetic team-first mentality puts him immediately at odds with Reese’s pragmatic agenda, and with his contract up at the end of the year, Emmett worries he’ll be on the chopping block if he speaks out too much. Told from the perspectives of the leads, the novel gives equal page time to Reese and Emmett. Their concerns––the scrutiny Reese must endure as a woman in a male-dominated industry, and Emmett’s worries over his contract renewal––are tangible and add a sense of urgency to their every decision. While the novel includes some unavoidable exposition dumps to orient readers, it more than compensates by establishing clear stakes and a sense of momentum from the outset. The narrative successfully introduces credible barriers to the romance, which largely follows recognizable genre beats. The baseball setting is also used effectively, with the season-long arc mirroring the couple’s romantic and professional journeys.
A smart, steamy romance.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781649379795
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Entangled: Amara
Review Posted Online: Feb. 13, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
