A strong debut about characters who meet in the pause between pain and hope.
Skylar King is a college recruitment officer with a rare chronic illness. Brandon Pike is a former pro snowboarder whose career ended in a very public accident. With pain setting the pace of their relationship, will they have the patience to learn one another’s rhythms?
The most important parts of Skylar’s life happen online, in the support group for people with chronic pain she started with her friends. It’s where she can be herself without having to worry about being professional or polite. Pike is an Olympic athlete whose entanglements with women are almost as legendary as his skill on the slopes. He finds much-needed anonymity in Skylar’s group until his mother pops up, responding to one of his posts on New Year’s Eve. Misinterpreting Pike’s raw grief for suicidal ideation, she threatens to call the police for a wellness check if he doesn’t call her. When Pike doesn’t respond, Skylar, trying to help, writes that she knows he’s fine because he’s asleep in her bed. Which is, to say the least, not true. And Pike is not happy, having always promised to tell his mother if he ever started dating someone. To make his mom stop hovering, Pike lightly blackmails Skylar by threatening to tell the other group admins what she did; thus, they enter a two-month fake-dating situation. Unlike the protagonists of many romance novels, Pike and Skylar get gritty—honest about their physical obstacles and very real about things like medical misogyny and toxic positivity. This book is also an extremely slow burn that pays off exponentially. The sex is super hot. Because Skylar and Pike learn early to communicate about pain and limitations, they’re great communicators by the time they do eventually hook up, which makes for some steamy dirty talk. Together they learn that while chronic illness comes with restrictions, their desire for one another does not.
A strong debut about characters who meet in the pause between pain and hope.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2026
ISBN: 9781538771570
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
A powerfully strong romance for readers who like their love stories full of torment and passion.
Best friends confront feelings for each other when they take a honeymoon trip together.
Francesca Gardiner and George Saint James have always been best friends—just like Jo and Laurie from Little Women, which they both love. Frankie has a big, complicated family and George was the boy next door who’d moved in with his eccentric grandmother. Their friendship survived childhood, awkward teenage years, and living together as young adults without ever venturing into the romantic—well, except for one kiss, but they don’t talk about that. When Frankie gets engaged to an older professor named Nate, George isn’t happy and a huge fight ensues. Despite his misgivings, George shows up to be her best man, but Nate leaves Frankie right before the wedding with only a cryptic letter. Devastated, Frankie goes to a friend’s house to recuperate, but her honeymoon is already planned and paid for—so she decides to travel to Tofino, a picturesque town on the coast of Vancouver Island, with George taking Nate’s place. Frankie wants to fix her friendship with George, but now that they’re in a romantic suite in a beautiful location, things are more complicated than ever. She’d always thought a relationship would be a bad idea, but she’s slowly beginning to realize they’ll never be able to go back to being kids. Maybe the only way forward involves forging a new kind of relationship. Fortune, the author of romances like This Summer Will Be Different (2024), returns with another love story full of longing and intense angst. The many allusions to Little Women are charming, and Frankie is a delightfully headstrong, feisty character. She and George have explosive chemistry, and Fortune manages to make the “will-they-or-won’t-they” nature of their relationship feel like life-or-death stakes.
A powerfully strong romance for readers who like their love stories full of torment and passion.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9780593953242
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A cleverly titled, cozy SF romance that marks Thorne as a writer to watch.
After purchasing a dilapidated, century-old starship called the Destitute, Torian Razner discovers that the moss covering it is, in fact, a deeply sarcastic sentient computer with abandonment issues.
Torian’s sister, Celise, is dying. Determined to save her life by getting her to a distant planet with air she can breathe, Torian ignores her former captain Amelia Perrosk’s warning that it’s an impossible task (along with any romantic feelings she might have for Amelia). Using the only ionite bars she has to her name, Torian purchases an ancient, moss-covered alien starship that appears to be on its last legs, so to speak. She hardly expected the moss to be a sentient computer or for it to hold a century-old grudge against its former alien captain. Moss quickly proves itself to be acerbic, intelligent, and rightly angry after being having been left behind for 100 years by its former captain. The two form a reluctant and surprising alliance, Torian proving to Moss that not all captains are “dog-turd fungus,” and they both gradually evolve into the best versions of themselves, human or otherwise. It’s obvious from the early pages that Thorne has crafted a story tailored to fans of Becky Chambers’ Monk & Robot series and Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries. Falling somewhere between the two, this is a delightful mashup of romance, found family, and a touch of violence as Moss grapples with its feelings about its former captain and the unexpected kindness that Torian shows. Sweet without being overly saccharine, it’s a book for readers who want the adventure that comes with the vastness of outer space without its harsher realities.
A cleverly titled, cozy SF romance that marks Thorne as a writer to watch.Pub Date: July 7, 2026
ISBN: 9781250414144
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bramble Books
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
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