BookView Review

A spirited friendship collides with rigid rules and buried grief in Exley’s warmhearted romantic drama. At eighteen, imaginative Tulsa Wakefield lives by a carefully constructed set of Rules meant to guide her safely through life. Then free-spirited Max Griffin stumbles into her private world and refuses to remain an outsider. Their friendship deepens despite Tulsa’s resistance, but tragedy tears apart her eccentric family and separates them. Eight years later, Tulsa returns to her childhood home and confronts everything she left behind.

Exley gives this second-chance romance unusual emotional depth by grounding it in Tulsa’s fiercely independent personality and richly imagined upbringing. Tulsa is a memorable narrator: witty, stubborn, intelligent, and frustrating in convincing ways, and her Rules evolve from an amusing eccentricity into a thoughtful exploration of the defenses people build against vulnerability. Max proves an appealing foil, matching her imagination and intellect while challenging the assumptions she treats as certainties. Particularly affecting is the novel’s treatment of family and belonging: Mossforge, Tulsa’s sprawling Victorian home, feels less like a setting than a repository of childhood rituals, private mythology, and loss. The leisurely pacing occasionally invites repetition, but the accumulated memories give the romance satisfying emotional weight. Readers drawn to wistful romances steeped in memory will be thoroughly charmed.

A tender, quirky, deeply nostalgic tale of grief, belonging, and second chances.

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