An equally silly and serious Georgian-era romance.
An antiquarian climbs out of the pit she’s excavating and finds more than she’s expecting aboveground.
Miss Georgina Harrington is frustrated with her cousin Percy Pendergrast, even though he’s the best of all her relatives. It’s not his fault she’s forced to stay hidden in Essex while he presents her discoveries under his name, but it still stings. When he disappears with her greatest find yet, she’s irritated and then worried, and she heads to London to find him. Instead, she finds Alexander Lovett, the gentleman who accompanied Percy on his last visit to her dig. When he begins to helps her search, and just as they’re enjoying a little flirtation, she learns that Alexander is better known as the Marquess of Heathford and that she’s been engaged to marry him by his stuffed shirt of a father and her detestable brother. Georgie is upset and Alexander refuses to do anything his father thinks is a good idea, but they’re both anxious to find Percy, so they come back together to look for him. They discover that there’s a dark conspiracy behind his disappearance—and that although their families arranged their marriage for all the wrong reasons, they may be meant for each other after all. Fans of Lady Charlotte Always Gets Her Man (2024) will be excited to see the notorious pub the Black Sheep pop up early on, as it signals certain chaos and cameos from beloved characters. The entire story is immensely entertaining, though it’s uneven in places, caught as it is between suspense, goofiness, and a great deal of spice. For those who like the combination, it will be exciting, but it can also lead to a bit of whiplash. Alexander has a clubfoot, which allows Marsh to respectfully depict life with a disability in the 1750s. And no reader will be able resist the joy caused by the unexpected number of chickens in this story, found both outdoors where they belong and in nice parlors.
An equally silly and serious Georgian-era romance.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781538739631
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Forever
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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: March 15, 2026
A heartfelt look at taking second chances, in life and in love.
Two struggling authors spend the summer writing and falling in love in a quaint beach town.
January Andrews has just arrived in the small town of North Bear Shores with some serious baggage. Her father has been dead for a year, but she still hasn’t come to terms with what she found out at his funeral—he had been cheating on her mother for years. January plans to spend the summer cleaning out and selling the house her father and “That Woman” lived in together. But she’s also a down-on-her-luck author facing writer’s block, and she no longer believes in the happily-ever-after she’s made the benchmark of her work. Her steadily dwindling bank account, though, is a daily reminder that she must sell her next book, and fast. Serendipitously, she discovers that her new next-door neighbor is Augustus Everett, the darling of the literary fiction set and her former college rival/crush. Gus also happens to be struggling with his next book (and some serious trauma that unfolds throughout the novel). Though the two get off to a rocky start, they soon make a bet: Gus will try to write a romance novel, and January will attempt “bleak literary fiction.” They spend the summer teaching each other the art of their own genres—January takes Gus on a romantic outing to the local carnival; Gus takes January to the burned-down remains of a former cult—and they both process their own grief, loss, and trauma through this experiment. There are more than enough steamy scenes to sustain the slow-burn romance, and smart commentary on the placement and purpose of “women’s fiction” joins with crucial conversations about mental health to add multiple intriguing layers to the plot.
A heartfelt look at taking second chances, in life and in love.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-0673-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Jove/Penguin
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
BOOK TO SCREEN
PERSPECTIVES
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