“The Romance Revival” has one of the more bonkers premises I’ve encountered in a while. Emery is a scientist working on a top-secret research project — so secret that even her husband Luca, a landscaper, doesn’t know the truth about her work. They love each other and have real chemistry, but Emery’s workaholism has created distance between them.
Then Luca is seriously injured, and Emery’s classified research turns out to be the only thing that can save him. It does — but he wakes up with no memories of his life before the accident. Including no memory of Emery. They have to start over entirely.
Honestly, it works better than it has any right to, which tells you something about how good Christina Lauren is. But it still doesn’t quite land. The book is tonally all over the place — part romance, part mystery, part sci-fi — and never figures out how to meld those three things together. The pacing is odd, with long stretches that feel like one genre in isolation, and then a totally chaotic scramble to wrap the plot up in the final ten percent.
That said, I genuinely appreciate that Christina Lauren never phones it in. They could easily churn out the same formulaic romance over and over at this point in their career and readers would buy it. Instead there’s a genuine creativity to what they do, a real desire to keep trying new things and no fear of going somewhere unexpected. This one might be nuts, but I honestly respect them for giving it a try.
Anyway, I’m a Christina Lauren completist so I don’t regret reading it. But I wish I’d waited for a library copy instead of buying it.
Recommended for readers who like the sound of sci-fi, mystery, and romance smooshed together — you may get more out of it than I did.
