Well Met

Every summer needs one book that smells of turkey legs and impending feelings, and Well Met is the desk's standing appointment. Jen DeLuca's debut installed the Renaissance faire romance as a durable modern micro-genre, and did it with a premise of beautiful economy. The heroine did not volunteer for this. Emily Parker arrives in small-town Maryland mid-crisis, unloading her life to help her injured sister and teenage niece, and is conscripted into the local faire, corset, tavern shifts, an accent she does not possess and all, because her niece needs a guardian on site and the town does not negotiate. The desk respects a book whose inciting incident is paperwork.

The paperwork has a face. Simon Graham, English teacher, faire organiser, and walking clipboard, treats the summer festival with a gravity Emily finds frankly deranged, and their opening skirmishes run the grumpy-sunshine current at proper voltage — she improvising, he auditing, both of them better at the banter than either will admit. The book's smart move is the faire itself as a machine for honesty: in costume, as the flirtatious tavern wench and the swaggering pirate captain he inexplicably becomes on grounds, Emily and Simon can say things the parking lot versions of themselves cannot, and DeLuca runs the double courtship — personas falling for each other faster than the people underneath — with real control. The desk has a professional weakness for romances about performance, and this one understands its subject: the mask is not a lie, it is a rehearsal.

What gives the comedy its floor is grief, handled with a light, sure hand. The faire is Simon's inheritance from a brother the town still mourns, and his rigidity, the book gradually discloses, is curation — a man maintaining a memorial he never chose and cannot renovate. Emily, herself rebuilding from a relationship that treated her as staff, recognises the shape. Two people learning the difference between serving something and hiding in it is the book's true business, conducted between joust schedules.

Honest notices: the third-act conflict runs on the genre's standard misread and resolves at festival speed; the faire detail is affectionate and thorough. Content notes for a belittling past relationship. Heat is warm and arrives with the summer.

Who is this for? Faire folk current and potential, grumpy-sunshine readers who like their grumps secretly bereaved, and anyone who ever found themselves in a costume they did not pick. Huzzah is the correct response. The series continues through the town, handing the faire to new couples each summer, and the desk renews its season pass annually, in costume, without shame.