When in Rome

Sarah Adams built her Kentucky the way Audrey Hepburn built a holiday, and When in Rome is the homage running at full wattage: a pop star flees her handlers in the night, drives until the tank and the platitudes run out, and breaks down in front of the one house in Rome, Kentucky whose owner absolutely does not want a houseguest. The desk shelves it as the grumpy-sunshine list's purest comfort entry, closed-door, open-hearted, engineered for bad weeks, and notes that the engineering is better than the packaging admits.

Amelia Rose is America's sweetheart in the exhausted sense: twenty-nine, micromanaged into a brand, singing songs she no longer means to crowds she cannot see past the lights, and running on the fumes of a childhood dream that has become a corporate calendar. Her Roman Holiday is deliberate — she watches the film the night she bolts — and Rome, Kentucky receives her with a dead engine and a population delighted beyond measure, except for one man. Noah Walker makes pies, maintains a scowl with civic dedication, and has recently been left at the altar-adjacent stage by a woman who chose a bigger life, which makes a stranded celebrity on his lawn a personalised insult from the universe. He lends her the guest room with the enthusiasm of a man donating a kidney. The town, meanwhile, adopts her instantly and conspires with the shamelessness of a Greek chorus that runs a hardware store.

What the desk admires is Adams's honesty inside the sugar. Amelia's loneliness is the real kind, the crowded kind, and the book is specific about fame as a job that eats its worker; Noah's grump is grief for a version of his life that left in a moving van. The pie shop, the sisters, the town's benevolent surveillance — all of it builds the argument the book actually makes, that being known in a small way beats being adored in a large one.

Honest notices: the door is closed and stated as information; the plot is gentle by design and readers wanting turbulence should fly elsewhere. Content notes are light. The pies are described at length, dangerously.

Who is this for? Anyone whose week requires a soft landing, Hepburn devotees, and every reader who has ever wanted to be somebody's regular instead of everybody's star. Pull over. The guest room is made up, grudgingly, and the pie is better than the scowl suggests. The companion volume hands the town to Noah's sister's best friend and the bodyguard, and the desk prescribes the pair together. Rome, Kentucky keeps its visitors. You have been advised.