A fresh rom-com with small-town charm and sparkling main characters.
In the second installment of Liasson’s Blossom Glen series, a bighearted therapist and a reluctant mayor clash and then fall in love.
Juliet Montgomery and Jack Monroe are “fixers” by temperament and reputation. Juliet has started a marriage and family therapy practice after years of study inspired by a bout with serious depression as a teenager following her father’s death. The only problem is, her fellow townspeople of Blossom Glen, Indiana, are aware of Juliet’s multiple broken engagements and are reluctant to accept relationship counseling from her. Meanwhile, Texas transplant Jack has successfully become Blossom Glen’s mayor, leaving behind his dreams of a career as an architect in order to help the beloved grandmother who raised him. However, Jack’s people skills are severely lacking. When a suddenly underemployed Juliet stumbles into a town meeting and helps Jack resolve several conflicts among Blossom Glen’s quirky and spirited residents, Jack decides to employ her as a temporary “town counselor” while he tries to save his grandmother’s land from the Omnibuild corporation. Soon, a coworking relationship becomes much more, but Juliet has resolved to curb her emotional spontaneity and Jack is wary of getting serious owing to trust issues stemming from his mother’s abandonment and his father’s unreliability. Can Juliet and Jack make it work and help preserve Blossom Glen? This series entry is a quintessential small-town romance that provides gentle humor and strong character development in abundance. Both Juliet and Jack are intelligent, accomplished, and deeply sympathetic to their friends’ and loved ones’ needs; in Juliet’s case, those loved ones include her sisters Tessa (the pastry chef protagonist of 2022’s The Sweetheart Deal, now happily married and pregnant) and Vivienne, who’s newly returned from Europe and working at a Christmas store while figuring out her life. The novel’s heat level doesn’t rise above kissing, but the chemistry between Juliet and Jack is palpable, whether they’re butting heads over town politics or eating ice cream on a dock. Juliet is also appealingly devoted to guiding others through mental health issues.
A fresh rom-com with small-town charm and sparkling main characters.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-64937-142-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Entangled: Amara
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A surprisingly sensual sports romance.
A collegiate diver and swimmer secretly pursue kink together, and risk falling in love along the way.
Scarlett Vandermeer is struggling. Despite a successful recovery from the injury that almost ended her Stanford diving career, she hasn’t been able to get her head together, and it’s affecting her performance. Plus, she’s trying to stay focused on getting into medical school. A relationship would be out of the question. By comparison, Lukas Blomqvist is a swimming idol, a record-breaker who wins medals as easily as breathing, and Scarlett has long been convinced he would never look in her direction—until one fateful night when a mutual friend lets slip that they have something unexpected in common: Scarlett likes to be submissive in the bedroom, while Lukas prefers to take a dominant approach. Now, they both know a big secret about each other, and it’s something neither of them can stop thinking about. It’s Lukas who suggests they have a fling—purely physical, just to take the edge off, so Scarlett can get out of her own head and stop overthinking her dives. Initially, their arrangement is easy to stick to, but the more time they spend together, the more Scarlett starts to realize that what she feels for Lukas is more than physical attraction. Complicating the situation is the fact that Scarlett’s friend Penelope Ross used to go out with Lukas, and the longer Scarlett keeps mum about her true feelings for him, the more difficult it is to keep the situation hidden from another person she really cares about. While Scarlett and Lukas’ relationship does begin as a physical one, their deeper psychological connection takes a little too long to emerge amid all the other storylines, resulting in a somewhat rushed resolution. However, Hazelwood’s latest is proof of the depth and maturity that has emerged in her writing over the years, and it highlights her embrace of sexier, more emotional elements than were present in her original STEMinist rom-coms.
A surprisingly sensual sports romance.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593641057
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A wallowing, emotionally wrenching family drama that leaves little time for romance.
Two people with bad luck in relationships find each other through a popular Reddit thread.
Emma Grant and her best friend, Maddy, are travel nurses, working at hospitals for three-month stints while they see the country. Just a few weeks before they’re set to move to Hawaii, Emma reads a popular “Am I the Asshole” Reddit thread from a Minnesota man who thinks he’s cursed—women he dates find their soulmates after breaking up with him, and the latest one found true love with his best friend! Emma has had a similar experience, which inspires her to DM the man and commiserate. She’s delighted by her witty, lively interactions with software engineer Justin Dahl, and is intrigued when he suggests that if they date each other, maybe they’ll each find their soulmate afterward. Emma upends the Hawaii plan and convinces Maddy to move to Minneapolis for the summer so she can meet Justin in person. The overly complex setup brings Emma and Justin together and the two hit it off, with Justin immediately falling head over heels for Emma. Jimenez then pivots to creating romantic roadblocks and melodramatic subplots centering on each character’s family of origin. Justin’s mother is about to serve six years in prison for embezzlement, which means Justin must move back home to care for his three much younger siblings. Emma was traumatized by her own mother for much of her childhood, left to fend for herself and eventually abandoned in the foster system. When her mother shows up in Minnesota, Emma must face her traumatic childhood and admit that she has prioritized her mother’s well-being over her own. There is little time devoted to Emma’s painful efforts to heal herself enough to accept Justin’s love, which leaves the novel feeling unsatisfying.
A wallowing, emotionally wrenching family drama that leaves little time for romance.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781538704431
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Forever
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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