An exemplary friends-to-lovers romance with characters who grow and change to find happiness with themselves and each other.
A woman offers to help her landlord out of a jam by pretending to be his girlfriend during a vacation.
Dr. Nicole Allen is about to complete her tenure as chief resident at Johns Hopkins before heading off to Duke for a fellowship in orthopedic surgery. After disciplining a well-connected intern at her job, Nic is put on administrative leave and the future of her fellowship is threatened. She cries on the shoulder of her landlord and best friend, Ben Van Mont. Ben has just learned that his ex-fiancee will be crashing a planned vacation with his childhood best friends on Martha’s Vineyard. Nic offers to go on vacation as a pretend girlfriend, hoping it will ward off his ex to see him with another woman. Ben and Nic are both trying to live life on their own terms. Even though Ben owns a successful financial planning firm, he’s a disappointment to his moneyed and high-powered family; Nic is determined to financially support her hardworking mother who sacrificed so much for her to become a surgeon. Once they arrive on Martha’s Vineyard, their firmly platonic relationship is suddenly imbued with delicious sexual tension and chemistry. They see each other in a new light: Nic recognizes that Ben’s commitment to loyalty and friendship was forged during a childhood of neglect, and Ben, who's White, sees the professional and personal challenges Nic faces as a Black woman. Their romance is sexy and emotionally satisfying, and Livesay’s portrayal of their journey from friends to lovers is perfectly paced and plotted.
An exemplary friends-to-lovers romance with characters who grow and change to find happiness with themselves and each other.Pub Date: Aug. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-297956-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
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
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