Hachette Library – Starred Reviews

★UNROMANCE

By: Erin Connor

Library Journal – Starred Review

Chryssy Hua Williams is a traditional Chinese herbalist specializing in healing heartbreak. Together with her aunts, she runs an inn and healing center for the brokenhearted, which is ironic, since the Hua women are cursed to never find true love. Cellist Vin Chao, one half of the Chao Brothers musical group, is known as a heartbreaker—none of his relationships have lasted longer than a month or two. When Chryssy and Vin have a conversation at a child’s birthday party, social media blows it out of proportion. Vin’s publicist wants him to run with it, as the publicity is helping sell concert tickets. So Vin makes a deal with Chryssy; if she will fake-date and then break up with him, he’ll help promote her family’s business. It seems like a perfect deal, but as they get to know each other, warning bells start to ring—this fake relationship could get very real if they don’t watch out. The protagonists are well-developed, and secondary characters provide levity as they push Chryssy and Vin together at every opportunity.

VERDICT With fluid writing and an unputdownable story, Jessen’s (Red String Theory) witty rom-com leans hard into the fake-dating trope with great success.

Forever: January 14, 2025; ISBN: 9781538759424, Paperback

★ BEEN WRONG SO LONG IT FEELS LIKE RIGHT

By: Walter Mosley

Library Journal – Starred Review

Ten years ago, as related in Down the River Unto the Sea, Joe King Oliver, a Black private eye, was framed for assault and sent to Riker’s. The three months he spent inside changed how he saw the world: he’s not so quick to play by the rules anymore. In his third outing (after Every Man a King),he juggles two explosive assignments. A billionaire hires him to find the wife who ran out on him, taking their seven-year-old daughter. He wants his daughter back, but Joe soon realizes he also wants revenge. If Joe turns him down, though, he’s signed his own death warrant. Then Joe’s 93-year-old grandmother asks him to find his father, Odin, who was imprisoned for homicide when Joe was young. Joe wants nothing to do with Odin, whom he blames for his family’s disintegration, but he can’t say no to his grandmother, who wants to see her son before she dies. So Joe ends up looking for a father he hates while saving a mother and child from a violent, sociopathic man.

VERDICT A gritty crime novel with a pace that never lets up; Mosley’s best work since the incomparable Easy Rawlins series.

Mulholland Books: January 28, 2025; ISBN 9780316573269, Hardcover

★YIN YANG LOVE SONG

By: Lauren Kung Jessen

Library Journal – Starred Review

Chryssy Hua Williams is a traditional Chinese herbalist specializing in healing heartbreak. Together with her aunts, she runs an inn and healing center for the brokenhearted, which is ironic, since the Hua women are cursed to never find true love. Cellist Vin Chao, one half of the Chao Brothers musical group, is known as a heartbreaker—none of his relationships have lasted longer than a month or two. When Chryssy and Vin have a conversation at a child’s birthday party, social media blows it out of proportion. Vin’s publicist wants him to run with it, as the publicity is helping sell concert tickets. So Vin makes a deal with Chryssy; if she will fake-date and then break up with him, he’ll help promote her family’s business. It seems like a perfect deal, but as they get to know each other, warning bells start to ring—this fake relationship could get very real if they don’t watch out. The protagonists are well-developed, and secondary characters provide levity as they push Chryssy and Vin together at every opportunity.

VERDICT With fluid writing and an unputdownable story, Jessen’s (Red String Theory) witty rom-com leans hard into the fake-dating trope with great success.

Forever: January 28, 2025; ISBN: 9781538741634, Paperback

★A SEASON OF LIGHT

By: Julie Iromuanya

Kirkus-Starred Review

A Nigerian family living in Florida bears deep, abiding, and distressing scars from a long-ago but devastating civil war in their native land. The 2014 kidnapping of 276 Nigerian schoolgirls by Islamic terrorists unhinges an already tightly wound Florida attorney named Fidelis Ewerike, a Nigerian émigré and father of two who, upon hearing of the kidnapping, decides to place his 16-year-old daughter, Amara, in her bedroom under lock and key. The mass kidnapping reawakens in Fidelis the traumas he sustained as a soldier and prisoner of war in the late-1960s Biafran War, during which his younger sister, Ugochi, went missing. Amara’s uncanny resemblance to Ugochi magnifies Fidelis’ mad zeal to protect her from faraway peril. (“He believed that if his sister…could be stolen, could disappear into thin air, then the same fate could befall his daughter. Never mind that this was America, not Nigeria.”) This bizarre, inexplicable act pitches each of the other Ewerike family members into their own traumas, starting with the infuriated, bewildered Amara, who gets no explanation from her father for her imprisonment, only lots of sweets and his own elaborately cooked, dubiously fashioned meals. “Pickles don’t belong in Mac and cheese,” she dolefully informs her mother, Adaobi, whose futile efforts to release Amara from captivity leave her desperately pursuing solace, even possible solutions, through her deep religious faith. Meanwhile, Amara’s 14-year-old brother, Chuk, is compelled by the tumult at home to stand alone in the face of physical and verbal abuse from other boys in the neighborhood. When a gang jumps him, Chuk is rescued by Maksym Kostyk, the 17-year-old son of an alcoholic local handyman (another emotionally damaged émigré), who offers to give him boxing lessons. Maksym meets Amara, and they find in each other’s solitude the foundations of a romance—and a mutual resolve to run away from their respective family crises. The interweaving nightmares and yearnings of these characters are evoked with empathy, tenderness, and intensely lyrical prose by Iromuanya, whose tale of abiding sorrow and its long-term consequences serves as a reminder that, as one of her characters observes, battles might end, but wars never do.

An affecting, observant rendering of the immigrant experience in contemporary America.

Algonquin Books: February 4, 2025; ISBN: 9781643755519, Hardcover

★Nesting

By: Roisín O’Donnell

Kirkus-Starred Review

In Dublin, a pregnant woman with two little girls flees a controlling, critical husband. O’Donnell’s striking debut opens with what looks from a distance like a happy family at the seashore. Close up, the water is too cold, the wind is too strong, and as tiny as they are, the girls have outgrown their wetsuits and their father is screaming at their mother, demanding to know what she’d done with the money he gave her to buy new ones. By the end of the first chapter, we want to get away from Ryan as badly as Ciara does, even if he’s handsome, loyal, a good provider, and hasn’t actually hit her…yet. That wetsuit money has been tucked away in a diaper bag in preparation for something Ciara hasn’t quite admitted to herself she’s going to do. And then, at last, it’s time. O’Donnell’s novel follows Ciara, Ella, and Sophie as they negotiate the harsh realities of sudden homelessness, father’s rights, and the Irish housing crisis. Ciara’s mother and sister live in England, she’s lost her pre-marriage friends, and she can pay for no more than one night’s accommodation with that roll of bills. With Ryan constantly hounding her by text, she eventually finds her way into emergency accommodations in a hotel with a dedicated floor for unhoused women and families. Here, she will make a friend and begin to figure out next steps—which are that much more complicated when a pregnancy test reveals the reason for her recent nausea and exhaustion. The mounting tension and suspense as Ciara struggles to stay free and safe make the pages fly. O’Donnell gives us a great character to root for and a portrait of her situation that is both terrifying and ultimately inspiring. An afterword confirms the impression that it’s based on research into real women’s experiences. A propulsive, nuanced, achingly real novel that will appeal to both Colleen Hoover fans and devotees of Irish fiction.

Algonquin Books: February 18, 2025; ISBN: 9781643755700, Hardcover