Two women get a second shot at love while working a chic California wedding. Tarot reader Kit Larson trusts the cards, even if they didn’t predict her recent heartbreak. Needing a fresh start, she takes a gig at a boho-chic wedding—only to discover her high school crush, Julia, is the planner. Julia, a perfectionist hiding her vulnerable side, is thrown off by the return of Kit, the woman who once broke her heart. As wedding events unfold, old sparks fly, and Kit’s cards suggest their love story may not be over after all.
If you didn’t have a phase during your teens where you were convinced that fate was speaking to you through the tarot cards you purchased for ten bucks in an ancient bookshop and didn’t actually know how to accurately read but still couldn’t stop shuffling around, did you even have a childhood?
All jokes aside, the synopsis immediately appealed to me because it was the first time I saw a tarot card reader in the leading role of a romance and Kit did not disappoint. Initially hired for a wedding, I was pleasantly surprised to see how much tarot played into the overall story and that it wasn’t discarded after but instead influenced the whole story—which makes sense, considering the cards always predicted Kit and Julia, childhood best friends, were twin flames.
And speaking of, I’m a sucker for a second chance romance so watching Kit and Julia find their way back to each other after not having seen each other for so long had me flipping the pages to see whether and how they could reconnect.
The plot is—just as its characters—messy and sometimes overwhelmingly dramatic (in a fun rom-commy way) yet always carries this undeniable attraction and fated pull between Julia and Kit with it. What I love most in romance is when you have individual storylines for the characters’ personal growth intertwined in their romance and The Lovers certainly delivered. Julia has her own ambitions with wanting her own business to flourish and dealing with the scars her ex left whereas Kit is struggling with the notion that what her parents have taught her about love and its movie-esque quality isn’t as true as she thought. Their personal journeys weaved in beautifully with their romance and added a lot of depth to them reconnecting.
There’s also the overarching theme of coming out in your twenties which I thought was handled quite well. Kit had a lot to work through when it came to her own internalised biphobia and repressing feelings which was so messy and so realistic. Coming out isn’t always a—excuse the pun —straight path and instead features just as many roadblocks and setbacks as it features revelations and genuine happiness and Kit goes through all of that. As much as I love reading YA stories about people coming out, I love that we are now also getting to see this representation in fiction for older individuals who might not have had the support system, the understanding or the space to come out in their teens.
While I did really vibe with the romance, there were two things that did take away from my enjoyment. For one, there wasn’t really a whole lot of diversity when it came to the cast of characters. Now, of course this can be somewhat reasoned to be because of the whole influencer set-up which is—often—overwhelmingly white in reality, but overall, there just seemed to be a whole lot of the same thing from looks to characteristics to social and ethnic background. I would have wished here for a bit more realistic and diverse characters to be thrown into the mix.
The second thing that made me struggle a few times with this debut was the pacing. For one, I never really understand romances where the main characters don’t meet in the beginning of the story or are at least teased to be meeting each other soon with *something* thrown into the path of their initial meeting. I do love a good backstory but especially in the beginning, the effort to develop the characters made me struggle to stay invested until Kit and Julia actually met. When they hadn’t met each other by chapter five—or remet, as it were—I had to push through to continue reading. Similarly, there was a whole lot of repetition of basic facts which made sense in the beginning to establish the characters but made the pacing drag especially in the middle when inner monologues just seemed to be regurgitated with no rhyme or reason. However, those are small gripes and nothing that should deter you from picking up this fun and inviting debut!
Looking for an atmospheric second chance sapphic romance? With a touch of fate and undeniable chemistry, The Lovers will make for a magical read and awaken the itch to purchase a new set of tarot cards to convince you that your fate is written in the cards.
The Lovers is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore, from September 24th 2024.
Will you be picking up The Lovers? Have you read it already? Tell us in the comments below!
Synopsis | Goodreads
A second chance at love is in the cards for two women working a stylish California wedding in this charming debut romance.
If Kit Larson believes one thing, it’s that the cards never lie. She’s seen it proven time and time again as a tarot reader and mystic influencer. But unfortunately the cards didn’t warn her about her most recent breakup or her parents’ divorce, so when Kit is offered a gig at another influencer’s boho-chic Joshua Tree wedding she accepts for the distraction. And distract it does when she finds out her high school crush, Julia, is the wedding planner.
Julia Kelley is her agency’s most sought-after wedding planner, and for a good reason—she’s a perfectionist. Control means never showing others the vulnerable, blobby mess she really is deep down inside. Having an ex-girlfriend in the bridal party is a problem, sure, but reconnecting with the beautiful tarot reader who broke her heart as a teenager is so much worse.
Kit’s cards once told her that she and Julia were Twin Flames, two halves of the same soul. With wedding events pushing them together, their spark reignites . . . and so does a chance at being lovers.
