workplace-romances

Falon Ballard’s sophomore novel, Just My Type, is a clever, upbeat rom-com that will leave a smile on readers’ faces and joy in their hearts.

Lana Parker is an expert dating and relationships columnist, but she’s also a serial monogamist who’s uninterested in (and perhaps incapable of) being single. Lana gets dumped by her latest boyfriend, rather than engaged to him, as Just My Type begins, but that’s not even the worst thing to happen to her that week. That honor belongs to the moment when Seth Carson, her high school boyfriend who is now a big-shot freelance journalist, takes an assignment from the website that publishes Lana’s column. Lana’s boss soon instructs the pair to write a dueling series of relationship articles in which Lana records her attempts to stay and enjoy being single and Seth tries to stop being a serial dater and instead become boyfriend material.

Since Seth is the one who got away, the assignment immediately proves difficult—in a delicious way—for Lana. Just My Type might have felt a bit less predictable if Ballard had flipped the gender stereotype, making Seth the one who needed to stop jumping into relationships and Lana the one who needed to learn to settle down. However, Just My Type is still a great showcase for Ballard’s talents: Her voice is fresh and flirty, her characters well developed (Lana’s unfailingly loyal, foulmouthed friend May is the kind of person we all need in our lives), and her pacing brisk and never boring. Romance readers—of all types—will be immensely entertained.

We’re living in an age of reboots. Everywhere you turn, another classic show or movie is getting a fresh start or a cast reunion. So it feels very much of the moment to have a romance set during the production of a beloved TV series’ 20th anniversary special.

The Reunion, Kayla Olson’s adult debut, opens as Liv Latimer, star of the groundbreaking, wildly popular six-season smash-hit series “Girl on the Verge,” steps back into the shoes of her character, Honor St. Croix. Her return to playing Honor comes with a return to the spotlight—which she mostly shunned after the show ended, choosing to stick to smaller indie movies instead—and a return to Ransom Joel. Ransom was Liv’s co-star, best friend, on-screen love interest and longtime real-life secret crush. In the years since “Girl on the Verge,” he’s become an international action movie star. Liv’s been out of touch with Ransom for years, but it only takes minutes in his company for all the old feelings to come back twice as strong. And after all this time, it seems like her feelings might be reciprocated . . . but falling in love is hard enough when the whole world isn’t watching. 

There’s plenty of Hollywood glitz in The Reunion (with luxe descriptions of houses and events), but underneath all the glamour is the poignant aura of a high school reunion. There’s nothing like being surrounded by people who knew you as a kid to help you realize how much you’ve grown up and which opportunities you’ve let pass you by. Olson’s characters are easy to root for all the way through, to the point that I found myself caring deeply about the reboot of a show that never existed. In fact, “Girl on the Verge” sounds so great that I’m sad I can’t watch it myself. And when love finally happens for Ransom and Liv, I felt all the thrill of a dedicated fan, finally seeing my OTP come to life.

If The Reunion has a weakness, it’s how perfect Ransom and Liv are for each other. They seem so mutually smitten right from the start that I half expected this to be one of those romances in which the heroine finally gets a chance with the man of her dreams but then discovers that it’s someone else she’s meant to be with after all. But on the other hand, it’s nice to think that love can be that simple, that clean. Maybe that’s what we like about all these reboots: the idea that we can go back to what we loved before and find it right there waiting for us—just as sweet as we remember, with a payoff that’s just as satisfying as we always hoped it would be.