Things We Never Got Over

There is a particular reading appetite (a full weekend, a blanket, a book with the dimensions of a loaf) that most modern romances are too efficient to feed. Things We Never Got Over exists for exactly that appetite, and the desk loves it without qualification for knowing what it is: six hundred unhurried pages of small-town comfort with a grump at the centre and an entire community in motion around him.

Naomi arrives in Knockemout, Virginia, in a wedding dress she fled in, answering a distress call from her disaster of a twin — who promptly vanishes, leaving behind unpaid debts, angry acquaintances, and an eleven-year-old niece Naomi did not know existed. She has no car, no money, and no plan. What she has, immediately and against his will, is the attention of Knox Morgan: bearded, barbering, professionally uninvolved, a man whose entire philosophy is a closed door — and who cannot seem to stop solving her problems while insisting, loudly, that he does not do complicated. The town watches him lose this argument with himself for several hundred satisfying pages.

What Lucy Score does better than nearly anyone is community as texture. Knockemout is not a backdrop; it is a functioning ecosystem of gossips, barflies, salon regulars, and one magnificently profane grandmother-figure, and the book's length is spent making the town feel inhabited rather than staged. By the midpoint the reader has opinions about minor characters' love lives. This is the point. The romance is the spine, but the pleasure is residency.

The centre holds because both leads are doing real work. Naomi's arc. The recovering people-pleaser learning that being needed and being valued are different economies: is drawn with more patience than the trope tends to receive, and her sudden guardianship of Waylay, the niece, gives the book its true emotional engine; some of the best scenes contain no romance at all, only two abandoned people learning to trust a kitchen table. Knox's gruffness, meanwhile, is a grief posture the book unpacks honestly rather than curing with a kiss.

Honest notices. The length is a feature but a genuine commitment; readers wanting economy should start elsewhere. The spice is frequent and enthusiastic, in Score's signature register. A suspense thread surfaces late and runs hotter than the cosy tone predicts — it works, but arrive knowing the book changes gears.

Who is this for? Anyone who wants to live somewhere for a week rather than visit. The desk shelves it as the modern benchmark of the long small-town romance — and as the reason our copy of the sequel was purchased before the last page was dry.