Day 5 — Reverie by Drew Taylor

Daily Recommendation · No. 005

★★★★★ 5/5 stars

Closed door / No spice

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Some books earn five stars by being really good at something familiar, and then there are the books that earn five stars by being something you've genuinely never encountered before. Reverie is the second kind.

Esme gets left at the altar, decides to go on the honeymoon anyway, and falls into a whirlwind romance with a stranger she meets along the way. The catch? She loses all memory of it. A year later, she has poured the whole experience into a novel, and the literary agent who wants to represent that novel looks unsettlingly, impossibly like the man she wrote as her hero.

The concept alone is enough to make you sit up straight, but what makes Reverie work is that Drew Taylor never lets the cleverness coast on its own originality. The pacing is fast in a way that feels completely earned because the emotional stakes are sky-high from the very first page. You keep thinking you can see where it's all heading, and then you find out you really can't, which is such a rare and satisfying feeling. The warmth and humour baked into the writing keep it from ever feeling too precious or too strange.

The faith thread is worth mentioning specifically because it's handled with real care. It feels like part of who Esme is rather than a message the story is trying to deliver, and that kind of integration is genuinely hard to pull off. If you've ever assumed that clean romance has to play it safe, this is the book that will happily prove you wrong.

This is a 5-star read for me, and I think it could be for you too.

Find it on Amazon →

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