Funny, deep, and romantic as hell. Will leave you smiling for days.
Can a bearded, romance-reading, retired rugby pro convince a Type A grad student to make room for love?
Zafir Ansari has been through hell and come out the other side. Seven years ago, his professional rugby career was cut short when he lost his brother and father in a car accident and sank into a clinical depression. Today, he works security at a university while volunteering for a youth rugby team and building his nonprofit, Tackle It, to help destigmatize mental illness and teach coping skills to young athletes. He has a major crush on workaholic, hyperrational Ph.D. student Danika Brown, who teaches in his building, but Zaf is pretty sure she's gay. They become a social media sensation thanks to a viral video of Zaf carrying pink-haired Dani to safety after an elevator mishap. Zafir asks Dani to pretend they're a couple to gain exposure for his charity, and the temporary arrangement is perfect for Dani, who is bi and only does “situationships” anyway. While bantering hilariously and having sex whenever possible, they both catch feelings, but Danika buries hers. As for Zaf, “his feelings for Dani were like sunlight: they’d always find a crack to slip through, a way to light things up.” Zafir treads carefully, introducing balance to Danika's life with home-cooked meals and insanely hot sex. Dani’s support helps Zaf reclaim his minor celebrity as a Muslim former pro rugby player (a rarity in Britain) and share publicly the personal tragedy that led him to found Tackle It. With Danika, Hibbert playfully subverts expectations, elevating the “too busy for romance” trope by giving her challenging personality traits that won’t disappear with a good shag and a few “I love you”s. She also wisely gives Zafir more to do than love Dani unconditionally, as deliciously swoonworthy as that is: He has to embrace his tragic past, as it's part of the man he is today.
Funny, deep, and romantic as hell. Will leave you smiling for days.Pub Date: June 23, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-294123-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
A must-read.
An ER doctor works to shake her family's expectations and find love with a younger man in this exemplary romance.
Alexis Montgomery comes from a long line of accomplished surgeons who have worked at the Royaume Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis since it was founded in the late 1800s. While she pursued a career in emergency medicine, she assumed that her twin brother, Derek, a plastic surgeon, would carry on the family tradition. When Derek announces he's gotten married while working in Cambodia for Doctors Without Borders and that he's planning to stay there with his new wife, the responsibility of working at the hospital and producing future surgeons falls to Alexis. Her only respite comes in the form of Daniel Grant, a handsome carpenter who's the mayor of small-town Wakan, Minnesota. Despite being almost a decade younger than Alexis, Daniel has been smitten since rescuing her car from a ditch while she was passing through Wakan; the pair shared a memorable one-night stand. Daniel has his own family lineage to uphold in the charming Wakan, which is full of chatty locals and creatively named farm animals. As in many of Jimenez's romances, Alexis' path to love and healing takes center stage as she works to free herself from the demanding, outdated wishes of her parents and set boundaries with a toxic, persistent former partner. Alexis and Daniel are precious together, and Daniel's warm excitement at getting to spend more time with a woman he finds amazing is the perfect embodiment of romantic joy. The romance is further enriched by a full cast of dynamic side characters, manipulative villains, and misguided relatives. This book is an emotional experience that will tick all the boxes for passionate romance fans.
A must-read.Pub Date: April 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5387-0437-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Forever
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
A satisfying crime novel with a side order of romance.
A TV producer and a detective try to stop a strange pattern of young women disappearing.
In “Auclair, Loooziana,” disillusioned detective John Bowie reluctantly meets in a bar with Beth Collins, producer for the true crime show Crisis Point. She needs to interview him about the disastrous case of the missing Crissy Mellin, but he refuses. The teenager disappeared three years ago on the night of a blood moon and hasn’t been found, but a suspect hanged himself in jail after signing a confession. Case closed, says John’s boss. But John is convinced that their prisoner could not have been guilty, and he’s deeply upset at his failure. “The Mellin case messed up your life,” Beth tells him. She persuades John that Crissy’s disappearance is the latest of a series that happen on the night of a blood moon, the colloquial term for a total lunar eclipse. “It’s going to happen again,” she predicts. And wouldn’t you know, another blood moon is coming in four days. Tick, tick, tick. Beth’s boss at Crisis Point insists on airing an update on the case, but Beth knows the show is going to get it wrong, and its reputation will be ruined. Meanwhile, there’s an electric sexual tension between Beth and John that the author toys with nicely—do they, or don’t they? The answer plays out in detail more than once. The characters are fun if easy to pigeonhole: the detective angry at his failure, the honest (and beautiful) outsider eager to do her job but susceptible to love, the hero’s corrupt (to say the least) boss, and the ogre who carries out said boss’s dirtiest deeds. Even John’s dog, Mutt, plays a small but vital role. When John found him, he’d been “a flea-bitten hide wrapped around a skeleton that whimpered.” Little plot devices are easy to spot, like the phone that rings at a crucial moment, or the handgun that John places in Beth’s hand for her protection. Does Chekhov’s guideline apply here? The romantic angle leavens the dark theme, and readers will have plenty of incentives to turn the pages.
A satisfying crime novel with a side order of romance.Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781538742983
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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