A terrific romance, both poignant and funny.
A successful Atlanta sports agent must work with the man who broke her heart a decade ago.
Jackie Miles doesn’t want or need a relationship. She has great friends, a full client roster, and the best dog in the world. She also has a nemesis: rival agent Antonio Steele. Ten years ago, they spent one perfect night together in Las Vegas as he was shifting his career from NFL player to agent. The next morning, she overheard him making a suspicious phone call and left without asking him to explain—but all these years later, Antonio still considers Jackie his perfect match. The sports world is small, so if their paths cross, Jackie treats Antonio with icy professionalism. When a merger between their companies is announced, Antonio hopes that closer proximity will create new opportunities for courting Jackie. This is the second book, after Losing Sight (2025), in Richardson’s series exploring the relationship between a woman’s personality and her senses, and after an interaction with a stranger in the vet’s office, Jackie mysteriously loses her voice. The woman, a mystical figure calling herself Mother Mary, tells Jackie, “You need to quiet your tongue and speak with your heart.” Jackie is sure she’s been hexed, but readers will understand the malady is meant to teach her to listen rather than jump to conclusions. A voiceless Jackie needs help signing a boxer hiding out at a lush Mexican resort, and their agencies send Antonio along, hoping that together they’ll be able to land the new client. Antonio and Jackie reconnect and finally resolve the long-ago events in Las Vegas, but Jackie is too prickly and independent to let her guard down for long. Richardson adeptly creates sympathetic characters in a richly layered world while maintaining a light, humorous tone. Jackie and Antonio are each fully realized adults on their own journeys, which makes their romance and happily-ever-after all the more rewarding.
A terrific romance, both poignant and funny.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9798998759635
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Generous Press
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Light on plot and heavy on bolstering traditional gender norms as the ultimate goal for both men and women.
A Seattle woman meets a Chicago businessman as she flies home from a visit to a friend, and her small act of kindness blossoms into more.
Maisy Gallagher is barely making ends meet. With her father’s unexpected death a few years earlier, she dropped out of nursing school to help out in the family’s jewelry store, working with her uncle. Her older brother, Sean, also moved back home so he and Maisy could help their mother and their 10-year-old brother, Patrick. When Maisy offers a ride to a rude businessman who sat next to her on the plane, she’s just operating on the kindness her grandmother instilled in her. That businessman, Chase Furst, turns out to be an incredibly wealthy banker; he’s flown into Seattle to make funeral arrangements for his mother, to whom he hasn’t spoken in years. Sparks fly in this gentle and predictable romance that leans heavily on long-distance and class-divide tropes. As with many of the author’s books, Christianity and the characters’ reliance on God’s will—as they wait and see what happens next—play a large part, as do traditional gender roles where women cook, clean, and only work in paying jobs until they have children at home to take care of. The author does offer a lighter touch when it comes to the painful ways alcoholism can destroy family relationships, with an understanding of the regret that can weigh on every family member.
Light on plot and heavy on bolstering traditional gender norms as the ultimate goal for both men and women.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9798217091676
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
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: March 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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