Fed up and burnt-out, a woman leaves the city to take on the challenge of owning a sunflower farm but finds that her biggest trial is facing her first love in this charming second-chance romance by USA Today bestselling author Danica Nava.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Sunflower Season by Danica Nava, which releases on November 3rd 2026.
Drained by her high-pressure tech job, June Walker finds an escape in homesteading videos and the fantasy of a quieter life. When she finally hits her breaking point, she does the only reasonable thing: She quits her job and buys a crumbling sunflower farm in rural Oklahoma, where she grew up.
June thought her biggest challenge in restoring Sunshine Farm would be the rotting fences but soon comes to the crushing realization that “positive vibes” are not a business plan. Nothing, however, tests her resolve quite like running into her first love, the boy she left behind after her world imploded when she was seventeen. She’s back for a fresh start, not to unpack old heartbreaks.
Noah Abbott never left Love County. Between his family, his job with the local fire brigade, and a town that knows him inside and out, he has everything he needs—except answers. So when June Walker returns as the new owner of Sunshine Farm, Noah is determined to find out why the girl who once meant everything to him vanished without a word.
As old wounds crack open and attraction flares back to life, June and Noah are forced to reckon with their past and decide whether first love is a memory best left buried or the one thing worth replanting.
EXCERPT
Chapter 1
June
It was dying!
Oh no. Oh no. Oh no.
This was tragic. Months of routine and discipline were going to be lost. The warning notifications for WahLah buzzed in my pocket and flashed on my smartwatch.
WahLah was an app that I created where you could grow your own little virtual garden that flourished the longer you spent time offline and walking outside. And now all that work planning, coding, and developing was for nothing because I was forced to sit in the dumbest HR-mandated team-building workshop ever. The rolling chair in the conference room was scratchy. The slides were ugly, with so much text compacted onto the 16:9 aspect ratio. And the voice of this consultant, just droning on and on, was grating on my ears. And all the while, my virtual garden was dying. What was I even doing here?
Why did I choose product marketing as my profession of choice in college ten long years ago? It seemed like the safest bet with the tech boom, and marketing was always needed to make products and companies stand out against a sea of competitors.
My decision for this career path was not out of any passion or love for product marketing. It came down to one simple thing: job security. Job security ruled every decision of my life, from where I went to college to where I rented my apartment, down to the way I styled my hair.
Employability.
I didn’t have fun tattoos . . . or any tattoos really, apart from my microbladed eyebrows, which I never knew if that counted as real tattoos. Whenever I was asked about tattoos, I was always sure the person meant some design or cliché quote across my abdomen. I didn’t have unconventionally colored hair or even a trendy haircut. I looked safe, marketable, and dependable. I lived in a crappy studio apartment fifteen minutes away from the office so that I could come in when needed and wouldn’t be stuck in traffic somewhere.
I packed my lunch every day to save money and calories. Everyone at the office loved going to the Americana diner across the street for lunch, where everything was some version of a deep-fried cheese. My acne-prone skin couldn’t handle that. After the few work dinners I couldn’t get out of, I always woke up with a breakout the next morning.
I liked my routines. I thrived on them. I liked knowing exactly how any given day of the week would go with little to no variety. I was prone to anxiety and worry-tripping about the future. Having my planner with my appointments, meals, and outfits written out in advance helped me cope in a world that was predestined for chaos, but I, June Walker, was not chaotic. My life was dependable.
I worked a lot of overtime, so I needed my days planned down to the minute to make sure nothing slipped through the cracks . . . like laundry. Oh shit! I passed out watching YouTube last night and forgot to change over the load. Battling mildew was not in my schedule. What my small studio apartment lacked in sunlight, it made up for by having an in-unit washer-and-dryer combo next to the sink in the kitchenette. Every Tuesday and Thursday night I did a load of laundry as I caught up on YouTube videos. And on a lot of Wednesdays and Fridays I ended up redoing the laundry to get rid of the smell of mildew. Just an average single twenty-eight-year-old workingwoman’s life. Carrie Bradshaw would never.
I have been employed by Muse Intelligence since I graduated from undergrad six years ago as a double major in computer science and marketing-again, for employability. I didn’t even like computer science. I pretty much detested every man in the product-and-engineering department, which meant I detested everyone in the product-and-engineering department-because in our company that’s who was employed there. Men. It was a sea of arrogant, mediocre men in this software company that provided AI for marketers. Who wanted to write content anymore when you could have these fun agents called “The Three Muses” that could write the copy for you, check to make sure it followed all regulatory guidelines, and publish and track the performance? I was essentially marketing my replacement, and soon I’d be obsolete. This was why in my spare time, I created my little app WahLah. For now, it was just for me and gave me purpose. I just got tired of always being online and glued to my phone. I even got a little walking pad for under my desk so that the app could track my steps, and with each milestone, my garden grew. That’s where the name WahLah came from; it was from the Chikashshanompa’ word wah lah, which means grow, as in plants growing. I thought it was cute.
My day job that paid the bills consisted of me making pitch decks and performing market research to get people excited to present our products at trade shows while rubbing elbows with the Adobes and Salesforces of the world. For six years I have done everything that has ever been asked of me and more.
Our CEO was the founder of the company, which meant he was bonkers. Thomas Finch slept in the office because that was what Steve Jobs did. You know who else did that? Elizabeth Holmes, and we all know how that turned out.
But I, too, have spent many all-nighters in this office. How could any of us go home when the CEO himself refused to. Keep working! This has to be the biggest product launch anyone has ever seen! He said that every product launch, even for the small add-ons that nobody cared about. That’s where product marketing came in-it was my job to get people to care.
But then Thomas and the company were sued by an ex-employee last year for fostering a hostile work environment, and now today, instead of hours of boring business-review meetings and decks, we were all forced to do HR-mandated team building. Which was probably the worst thing I have ever had to endure at this company that now employed a “chief fun officer.” Said CFunO (as not to be confused with the title of chief financial officer, CFO), Randall, was sitting next to me.
Lightning, strike me down, please.
“For this session of team building, we are going to break the ice with a fun little game of two truths and a lie. Anyone want to volunteer to go first?” Gail, the consultant who was hired by our HR team, asked at the head of the long U-shaped conference-room table. She seemed nice enough, if old-fashioned with her agenda of team-building exercises that looked like someone googled “last-minute team building exercises that cost zero dollars.”
My knee was bouncing as I looked at the clock on the wall. Cell phones were not allowed on the conference table, but my smartwatch was vibrating incessantly. Goodbye, little garden, it was a nice yearlong streak. It was rudimentary graphics, barely an upgrade to old Tamagotchis, but I was fond of it.
“I would love to kick this off,” Randall volunteered, which surprised absolutely no one. “Let’s see, I went to Harvard . . .” He was wearing his Harvard quarter-zip fleece. His thermos was Harvard branded. Hell, every time he spoke to anyone, he dropped the line Well, you know I went to Harvard . . . As if we could forget. He continued, “I biked the loop around Yosemite in under two and a half hours . . . and Madonna asked for my number in Vegas.” He sent a wink out to everyone at the table.
The male employees looked up to Randall as if he were a god. They all pitched in and got him a gold plaque on his door that read g.o.a.t. They threw around the title like being the greatest of all time as a “fun officer” at a software tech startup was the equivalent of being the MVP in the NBA.
If only they sold m.m.m.w.e.m. plaques, which of course stood for Most Mediocre Man Who Ever Manned. That was more appropriate.
“Tricky!” Gail laughed. “Okay, team, we are going to vote. Raise your hand if you think Randall going to Harvard is true.” Every hand went up in half a second.
Gail threw her head back and laughed again. “Let’s see if the next two are just as easy. Raise your hand if you think biking the loop of Yosemite in under two and a half hours is a lie.”
Every hand shot up except for mine. He biked the loop in under two and a half hours, and we sponsored him to do it for ALS awareness. I made the flyers for LinkedIn when we didn’t have anyone running communications.
“Interesting,” she said. “So, everyone else thinks that the Madonna one is true?” Everyone around the large conference table nodded their heads. “Who thinks Madonna asking for Randall’s number is the lie?”
My hand was the only one raised. Randall kneed my thigh under the table and whispered out of the side of his mouth, “Don’t say anything.”
“One single doubter, Randall,” Gail said, laughing and turning to me. “Why do you think it’s a lie?”
“Because I was there.”
Everyone gasped.
“Spoilsport,” Randall muttered so no one else could hear. Then he started laughing, that fake kind of laugh men did to try to control a room when they were losing it. “June is right, she was on the Vegas trip when we ran into Madonna at the Wynn. June had a little too much to drink, so she probably doesn’t remember, right?”
“I never drink,” I countered. Not when working, and I sure as hell wouldn’t drink on a work trip in Vegas with these bros. That was how women went missing, trusting slimy men like these.
“Well, how do you explain this photograph?” He pulled out his phone and flashed a picture of a blond woman in huge sunglasses posing for a photo with a group of bridesmaids in pink boas.
“She was a Madonna impersonator,” I said factually. The room started laughing. “A pretty good one.” I gave credit where credit was due.
“So you didn’t meet Madonna?” Don from engineering asked.
“Of course I did, she said that was her name,” Randall scoffed with a wink.
“The game was two truths and a lie,” Don grumbled. He was a rule follower; most engineers were-they were very literal, in my experience. “All you gave were truths.”
“Madonna is the lie,” I countered.
“You got me.” Randall raised his hands.
“Okay, okay, settle down. I think it’s someone else’s turn. Why don’t you go next, June?” Gail asked.
I hated the way every pair of eyes settled on my face. I wanted to melt into the floor. My watch alerted me that my heart rate was too high. No shit! This was why I needed my walking time.
“This should be easy,” Randall snickered with that fake, sleazy-politician laugh of his again.
This man pissed me off, and I wanted to trump him.
“I grew up in Love County, Oklahoma. At seventeen I snuck into a dive bar and entered a karaoke contest and won. And . . .” The pause felt like it went on for an eternity. My brain short-circuited. “And . . . I met the Crocodile Hunter when I was eight.”
Randall chuckled into his fist, and everyone else was quick to join him. “That’s too easy, the lie is the karaoke one. Who’s going next?” And just like that I was dismissed, laughed at, and forgotten. I gripped my fingers under the table as my heart pounded.
“Joe, what have you got?” Randall asked the HR business partner to my right.
“You’re wrong,” I said as my anger seethed.
“What was that?” Randall asked me, his smile sickeningly passive-aggressive.
“You’re wrong.” My voice sounded more sure, more confident.
“One, we know you’re from Oklahoma, we can hear it in your voice.” He held up his index finger, then added a second finger. “Two has to be the lie because you are the quietest person in a room, no offense. You’re a rule follower, June. I don’t believe even at seventeen that you snuck into a dive bar to do karaoke and then won. Steve Irwin was always doing fan stuff, so you probably met him then. See, easy.”
“Okay, everything about that was offensive.” I looked at Gail and then Joe. How could that be allowed in an HR-sanctioned team-building activity? The incivility went against the entire exercise.
“It was rude but not unethical, immoral, or illegal, June, so there is really nothing we can do. Randall, do you want to apologize?” Joe asked while he fiddled with his pen cap.
“I said no offense. I just meant your character is very reserved and . . . safe. It’s impossible to believe you are capable of such bold behavior. Am I right, guys?”
The men grumbled. Gail, the only other woman in the room, looked at me with pleading in her eyes, as if to say Don’t make a big deal, let’s just move on and forget it.
I didn’t want to forget.
“Well, I did do that. I got grounded for two weeks because of it. I never met Steve Irwin.”
“Oh, shit!” the guys in finance exclaimed.
“Language,” Joe warned. He was really doing the heavy lifting here.
“What happened to you? Are you hiding the real you under all that ice?” Randall chuckled again and then looked away, moving on to the next person to play the game. It went on and on until all twenty people in the room had taken a turn.
What happened to me? Nothing happened to me. I wasn’t boring. I just worked nonstop so I could pay off my student loans-I made my last payment three years ago. Now I was saving for a down payment on a house in San Francisco to make the best investment I could. I was trying to build generational wealth as one person. Randall’s dad went to Harvard and made a fortune managing a hedge fund-by being born, Randall had it easy.
Meanwhile, I grew up in a little town called Marietta in Love County, smack-dab in the middle of the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma, population 2,800. It was hard to get a weekend job when everyone else was just getting by and mom-and-pop shops employed family members or barely paid minimum wage. We shopped at Angel Thrift, and an outing to the closest Walmart was considered a big deal. It took everything in me to leave Love County and never look back.
I broke the rules and pulled out my phone to check on my garden. It was shriveled up with a big green button that read START OVER? I stifled a sigh. I wished I could start over in a lot of areas in my life. I slipped my phone back into my pocket. I felt completely deflated.
Excerpted from Sunflower Season by Danica Nava Copyright © 2026 by Danica Nava. Excerpted by permission of Berkley. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
