A somewhat uneven romance, but the colorful characters make it worth reading.
In Sherrard’s novel, a young man finds love and adventure while working a summer job at a national park.
The year is 1968. Twenty-year-old Wayne Sherrard is returning to the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology in the fall, but before then he wants to earn a little money while he’s at home in Cold Lake, Alberta. Unfortunately, the job opportunities in town are few, so Wayne heads to Jasper National Park, where he’s offered a position driving tour buses and boats at Maligne Lake. It’s a dream job: The views are beautiful, and there are plenty of pretty girls around, too. Even though Wayne isn’t looking for anything serious (he has a goal to remain single until he’s 30 and then settle down), he ends up meeting and falling for the strong-willed Eileen Farley, who gets a job working at the same lodge. Inspired by true events, the novel follows Wayne through the summer as he makes new friends, climbs beautiful and dangerous mountains, and struggles to reconcile his desire to stay single and his growing feelings for Eileen, all against a backdrop of popular 1960s songs. Sherrard masterfully creates a cast of characters who feel lively and unique from each other—Wayne’s roommates, Paul and Tom, bring a fun energy to the story with their likable personalities. However, the dialogue can sometimes feel stale and unrealistic: “Of course, I’ll let you know ahead of time so you can clean up your messes, hee hee.” The pacing is a bit rocky in places—partway through the story, there’s a scene in which a prominent character dies, and after only a brief acknowledgment, the incident is never mentioned again. Wayne and Eileen have a tense, on-again, off-again relationship, which feels true-to-life and relatable, but some readers might find the ending rushed.
A somewhat uneven romance, but the colorful characters make it worth reading.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 222
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Rowell delivers the requisite happily-ever-after, but it doesn’t quite satisfy.
A second-chance romance from the author of Slow Dance (2024) and the Simon Snow Trilogy.
Cherry is fat. There are other things to know about Cherry, but this fact is essential to how she sees herself and—she knows—essential to how other people see her. And now that her husband’s hugely popular webcomic is a movie, she not only has to endure people confusing her with the character that’s based on her, but also the knowledge that the actor playing this character is wearing a fat suit. This pain is exacerbated by the fact that her marriage is over. It’s at this rock-bottom moment that her college crush reenters her life…This is a book about being fat, and Rowell does a great job of depicting what internalized fatphobia looks like. “Cherry was so used to thinking about being fat, she hardly even noticed that she was doing it. She was so used to thinking about being fat, she never thought about it.” Observations like this will resonate with a lot of readers, as will Cherry’s complicated feelings about weight-loss drugs. This is also a romance and, as a romance, it’s kind of all over the place. It’s totally realistic for Cherry to wonder if Russ—the guy from college—never pursued her because of her weight. This is a conflict that feels true. What’s less believable is the way he reacts when he sees a trailer for Cherry’s husband’s movie. It’s clear that he didn’t get that this movie was going to be a blockbuster. In short, Russ freaks out, and it’s not at all clear why. As for Cherry’s husband, the way she feels about him at the beginning of the book is totally disconnected from the way she feels about him in the novel’s latter half. It’s normal to have complicated feelings about the end of a marriage, of course, but there’s no emotional throughline to help the reader understand why Cherry’s feelings change so dramatically.
Rowell delivers the requisite happily-ever-after, but it doesn’t quite satisfy.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9780063380264
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
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