This nearly perfect rom-com hit all the right notes for me. Monaghan's tone was spot-on, and her fake-dating story and characters had me abandoning real-life duties to get back to reading this delightful, banter-filled, layered, lovely novel. Single mom Dolly Brick (her mother was a country music fan) returns to her seaside Rhode Island hometown of Whitfield for the summer to help her hardworking dad with his fish shop, support her brother, who has schizophrenia following a t

The premise of this novel is irresistibly cute as two writers find themselves living and writing about endless romance tropes, but the tone shift and the story's veering into poignant tragedy surprised me and felt out of synch with the beginning of the book. Katie and Tyler were childhood neighbors and friends, on the verge of young love, then devastated, bound together, and pushed apart by a shared tragedy. Years later, they are completely estranged. Katie is a ghostwriter f

Abby Jimenez knows how to layer difficult situations and messy complications into her rom-coms, and her main protagonists must confront and overcome past and present difficulties in order to banter their way through the story and build a sweet life together. I was hooked on the chemistry and fascinated by the significant, heartbreaking obstacles and how they might possibly be addressed to allow for love. Larissa made a split-second decision one night after a concert, when she