Quarter-life Crisis book about Emma who has left teaching and moved back to Boston. The child of teachers, she has been devastated and upset by being in education and is working part time at her best friend Jo’s coffee shop. She rented a basement apartment and is surprised to learn that her college best friend Harrison is leaving in the same building. We know that things ended poorly with them, and he seems to have a codependent relationship with his mother and he hasn’t been totally honest about who Emma was to him to his current girlfriend.
The romance and relationship in this novel is really strong, I wanted to know Harrison even better. Jo as a minor character is very well developed instead of just someone for Emma to confide in, she is a solid comic relief and helps the narrative along. While this is a second chance romance, at its core this is a story about Emma coming to terms with the condition she has called vaginismus. I had no knowledge of this prior to reading and I found this pretty enlightening. If you have this condition or knows someone who does, this novel does the heavy lifting of taking us into internal dialogue and the journey to work with this condition. Emma goes through the stages of grief, being in denial for a long time. In the current timeline she is accepting of her condition but still needs to go through the process to treat it. I can imagine this is something that is somewhat embarrassing and it is none of someone’s business until it is.
Very promising debut, I appreciated the author’s note at the end and I even got to read the beginning of her next novel. I think she is a great writer and I look forward to her next title.
Thank you to NetGalley and Dial Delights for the ARC. Book to be published in July of 2026.
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