Elizabeth Mazer

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but sometimes a song can capture a whole era—a slice of your life recreated whenever you hear that opening riff. The movie The Breakfast Club made the song “Don’t You (Forget About Me)" so indelibly iconic as the theme song for high school archetypes that when I saw the title of this book—and immediately got the song in my head—I wondered if it would be able to live up to the nostalgia it would trigger. Rest assured, it does.

Like The Breakfast Club, Mhairi McFarlane’s glorious, hilarious heartbreaker of a story begins with high school students pushed together by circumstances out of their control, vividly aware of their places in the social hierarchy, baffled and delighted by their mutual attraction. Their strictly-in-secret love story is sweet, innocent and almost breathless in its sweaty-palmed elation.

And then the film reel cuts out and the story picks up twelve years later.

Our heroine, Georgina Horspool, never left her native Sheffield. Never achieved her dream of becoming an important writer. Never quite found her niche at all, in fact, and has the rug of her unsatisfying life doubly pulled out from under her in just one night. First, she’s fired from her (miserable) waitressing job. Then she finds her (egocentric cad of a) boyfriend in bed with his assistant. Desperate for any opportunity that’ll keep her from being the object of pity (again) at the family’s weekly brunch, she jumps at the chance to tend bar for a private event at a new pub. It goes well, she’s offered a job and she’s eager to accept—but then she learns that the job means working with Lucas McCarthy who is, of course, the boy she loved a decade-plus ago and lost somewhere along the way.

So far, so expected. McFarlane’s writing is funny and charming enough to keep her readers engaged, but the beats in the first part will feel familiar as the story shifts from The Breakfast Club to Bridget Jones’s Diary. Still, as the story progresses, the madcap humor starts to mingle with deeper emotions. Georgina is self-aware in a way that Bridget never managed. Her relationships with her friends and family delve below the surface, uncovering real emotions and deep-seated issues. When she talks about discovering a beloved parent’s infidelity, there’s no punch line payoff. It feels real and visceral. When her dreadful ex tries to win her back, it’s not funny—it’s an awful ordeal that Georgina correctly identifies as manipulative and bullying. And readers should be aware that this novel contains a graphic description of sexual assault that could be triggering to some individuals. It is devastating and unflinchingly honest, but it is not gratuitous. Understanding the details of what occurred is pivotal to understanding the plot and characters.

Any romance reader will be able to peg that Lucas and Georgina are made for each other, but they have to put in some real work—on both sides—before they’re emotionally ready for happily ever after. McFarlane doesn’t skimp on sly humor or wacky characters, but no plot point has an easy fix and no character feels two-dimensional. Even the broadest personalities are loving, or loyal or cruel in tactile and vivid ways. And as the book progresses, you realize how much depth and truth there was to the characters and the story all along.

Travis Ford has been Port Jefferson’s pride and joy ever since he was a high school MVP knocking grand slams out of the park. The fame and success that followed (topped with a certain scandal-sheet notoriety: photos from an interrupted interlude earned him the nickname Two Bats) surprised no one, least of all Georgie Castle, his best friend’s little sister who always idolized him from afar. But when Travis returns to town, directionless and depressed after an injury and multiple surgeries have drained his career and his sense of self-worth, Georgie catches his eye in a way she never had before—by chucking greasy leftovers at his head and dragging him, kicking and screaming, back to life.

With the small-town vibe, the local-boy-makes-good-hero story, the second-chance romance and the best-friend’s-sister trope all coming together, you may think you know where Fix Her Up is going, especially when Travis and Georgie concoct a plan to fake a relationship to boost their reputations. If you’re certain it’ll inevitably lead to hijinks, misunderstandings, personal resolutions not to get attached and irresistible attraction that makes the fake romance real in spite of everything . . . well, you’re right. So what? You know where a rollercoaster is going before you get on. That doesn’t stop it from being an amazingly fun ride. And this story has more than enough heat and excitement and sweetness and charm to keep you glued to the page.

Travis really will make your heart (and other places) throb with his physical confidence, his full-throttle sensuality and the delicious way he gets caught up in the heroine despite his attempts to keep his distance. And girl-next-door heroine Georgie is definitely sweet. She works as a clown at kids’ birthday parties, and her easy propensity for joy is as natural and infectious as any child’s. And yet she is also fully grown up in her tastes and desires and deeply insightful in the way she angers, teases, soothes and motivates Travis into discovering the man underneath the playboy façade. My favorite part of Fix Her Up is how good they are for each other—and how much richer their lives are from having the other’s support on the way to seizing their dreams.

With a couple this fresh, engaging and endearing, a happy ending seems like an inescapable conclusion. But in the hands of Tessa Bailey, it feels more like a justly earned reward for everything Travis and Georgie have done to make us fall in love with them along the way. I already can’t wait to see them making cameos in the author’s upcoming sequel, Love Her or Lose Her.

Nothing says romance like a crowded, grimy airport, right? Throw in a winter storm, cascading flight cancellations and snarky, utterly unhelpful desk agents and you’ve got the perfect recipe for, well, maybe not a meet cute, but at the very least, a meet desperate. And desperate is exactly what fashion model Gia Gallo is when her flight—scheduled to take her from snow swept New York to sunny, beachy Florida for the wedding of one of her closest friends—is called off.

Riding (reluctantly) to her rescue is restauranteur Bennett Buchanan, best man at the wedding and also ticketed on the flight that was cancelled. He’s not happy about the flight, or the weather, or Gia in general. (The way she chewed out the guy at the ticket counter made a lousy first impression.) But his personal code, burned into him through hard lessons in his younger years, won’t let him leave her stranded. It starts as a strained compromise—literally “any port in a storm”—when he offers her somewhere to stay for the night. It leads into a tentative partnership when their shifting travel plans result in them renting a car to drive the rest of the way. It develops into respect and appreciation as they get to know each other better and see different sides of each other. And then, through shared meals and shared confidences and plenty of shared intimacies, it blossoms into something more.

The roadmap for the story is pretty straightforward. Hollywood has been making bank for the past century or so on the idea of seemingly mismatched couples finding love on a road trip. But as with any really worthwhile voyage, the destination matters less than the journey along the way. And this journey shows some lovely thoughtfulness and insight in the places where Holiday pauses to reevaluate the characters and dig deeper into what’s made them who they are. I’d have liked the story to go even further—it only skims the surface on bigger issues, like the sexual harassment that’s par for the course in the fashion industry, or the way that toxic privilege encourages spoiled rich kids to become the worst possible versions of themselves. But I understand that at the end of the day, this story has a goal of Happily Ever After to reach, and it can’t linger too long at any of the stops along the way. And since that HEA is reached with warmth, humor, steamy interludes, excellent friendships and really delicious-sounding food, I couldn’t bring myself to mind.

In this exuberantly charming romance from Christina Lauren, the talented writing duo does the seemingly impossible. They take the classic, much-maligned stereotype of the “cool” girl—the gorgeous, wild, sexually-liberated, adventurous madcap that men go crazy for—and they make her feel real and engaging. Hazel Bradford knows perfectly well that she’s the type of woman that men adore at first sight. She also knows that it only takes a few weeks for the bloom to come off the rose as her exploits start to seem embarrassing instead of entertaining. She’s pretty much resigned herself to being wanted very badly but never for very long. Her best shot at companionship, aside from her menagerie of pets, is friendship. Enter Josh Im.

Though they first met—in an epic series of disastrous encounters, of course—when they were in college, it’s only when they reconnect ten years later that they truly bond. Naturally, the bonding includes its own series of grand catastrophes, such as when Hazel moves into Josh’s guest room after her apartment floods, and then accidentally knocks Josh unconscious when she thinks he’s a burglar. But as Josh learns to see past the chaos to the warmth and kindness at the core of Hazel’s personality, he sees a woman who deserves to be loved. By someone else, of course—not by him. And thus begins a series of hilariously awful double dates that they set each other up on, and because they both crave the excuse to spend time together, continue to do so despite the terrible results.

In so many stories of this type, the journey is about the free spirit woman helping the more buttoned-up man let loose and learn to enjoy himself. And yes, there’s a little of that here, as Josh learns that pretty much everything is more fun with Hazel along for the ride. But Lauren deepens his character beyond the handsome straight man by exploring his experiences as the son of South Korean immigrants, and makes the canny choice of having his reactions to Hazel fall much more on the side of bemused affection, rather than an annoyingly superior disapproval.

The real growth is on the other side of the coin, as Hazel slowly relaxes into the idea that Josh genuinely doesn’t expect her to apologize for being herself. He’s not infatuated with some idealized image of her—instead, he loves her for everything she is. The fact that that’s such a surprise to her is a little heartbreaking, but the impossibly sweet conclusion washes all the pain away.