A fizzily entertaining, emotionally sensitive take on the tug of war between success and fulfillment.
A young man must choose between love, authenticity, and manufacturing pantyhose in Abbott’s comic romance novel.
Alex Halaby, a 30-year-old Princeton grad who labors at his father’s pantyhose company (and who feels like his life has been preprogrammed by his domineering parents), quits and roars into the Manhattan night on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle, his sole signifier of independent manhood. There he meets Emily, the equally dissatisfied young wife of billionaire layabout Charles Lukes, who is dismissive of her ambition to be a painter and unforgivably bad at sex. Alex is great at sex, intimate conversations about their yearning souls, and singing satirical Tom Lehrer songs while accompanying himself on the piano; Emily can’t resist, and in short order she is pregnant with his baby. Guilt-stricken over the infidelity, Emily cold-shoulders Alex, who has his hands full when his father, Harry, suffers a heart attack, requiring Alex to step in to save the family company from bankruptcy. The author’s soap opera is a glittering sendup of Manhattan high society in the early 2000s, an upper-crust in which the men are fatuous stuffed shirts and the women frivolous fashionistas (“ ‘the banning of lapdogs from New York City restaurants is utterly deplorable, inhumane, and anal,’ ” declaims Charles’ sublimely shallow ex-wife, Claire). But the novel takes its protagonists’ longings seriously, and as Alex matures, he begins to appreciate Harry’s business as a meaningful outlet for his talents. Abbott probes his characters in vigorous prose that’s two-fisted (“You’re nothing but a cocky little punk who’s been playing in Daddy’s sandbox for, what, a month?”) and psychologically resonant (“The expertly rendered expressions were fractured, chaotic, and intense but oddly enigmatic: a savage glare full of amusement, a smile about to dissolve into weeping,” Alex observes of Emily’s clown paintings). Readers will root for Alex and Emily to figure themselves out amid the circus of preening wealth that surrounds them.
A fizzily entertaining, emotionally sensitive take on the tug of war between success and fulfillment.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 2022
ISBN: 9781663246974
Page Count: 284
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2023
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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