Emma Lord's THE BREAK-UP PACT

Thanks to partners NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the digital ARC of Emma Lord’s The Break-Up Pact. The book will be published tomorrow.

You can’t go wrong with a book by Emma Lord. Her five YA novels have made her an auto-read author, so when I saw she was expanding into adult romance, I was thrilled! Her new book The Break-Up Pact, which features , friends to lovers, second-chance romance (of a sort), AND fake dating does right by its tropes and confirmed my commitment to reading everything she writes.

June and Levi were—along with June’s sister Annie—inseparable as kids and clear through high school. And then, as Levi and Annie, and then June, went to college, they drifted apart. June started dating Griffin, joining him on global adventures—and, by extension, on his quest for fame. She thought they were happy . . . until he returned from a solo trip with someone new, breaking up with June on a reality tv show and making her (the Crying Girl) a viral sensation.

Levi has achieved fame of his own, and his fiancee left him for an action movie star, meaning that Levi, too, has become a viral object of pity.

Levi returns to town, finding June running Tea Tides, the tea shop that she and Annie had always dreamed of opening. Now, in the wake of Annie’s death, June is struggling on all fronts, failing to make the business a success, losing the love that she thought she had, and finding herself unsure how to deal with the unresolved feelings she still has for Levi.

June and Levi wallow in misery for a while, and then June’s best friend Sana has an idea: they can each emerge with a little more dignity, a chance for Tea Tides, and some envy-inspired romance for Levi if they just pretend to revenge date for a while.

And so the Break-Up Pact is born.

Lord has such a fantastic touch with characters that I fell in love with June and Levi and all of their family and friends right away. The Break-Up Pact is steamier than Lord’s YA books for sure, but it captures the same giddy sense of new relationships and possibilities while balancing the wistful longing for the days when June and Levi were best friends and Annie was still alive. 

I so appreciate the way the novel peels back the layers of each character’s recovery and of the rebuilding of their multifaceted relationships. It’s a lovely read, a moving portrait of compassion and friendship, grief and love, and it’s about characters figuring out who they are and how being with the right person can help them build stronger individual identities.

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