A refreshingly timely and relatable debut novel about a young woman whose life plans fall apart when she meets her wife.
With her newly completed PhD in astronomy in hand, twenty-eight-year-old Grace Porter goes on a girls’ trip to Vegas to celebrate. She’s a straight A, work-through-the-summer certified high achiever. She is not the kind of person who goes to Vegas and gets drunkenly married to a woman whose name she doesn’t know…until she does exactly that.
This one moment of departure from her stern ex-military father’s plans for her life has Grace wondering why she doesn’t feel more fulfilled from completing her degree. Staggering under the weight of her father’s expectations, a struggling job market and feelings of burnout, Grace flees her home in Portland for a summer in New York with the wife she barely knows.
In New York, she’s able to ignore all the annoying questions about her future plans and falls hard for her creative and beautiful wife, Yuki Yamamoto. But when reality comes crashing in, Grace must face what she’s been running from all along—the fears that make us human, the family scars that need to heal and the longing for connection, especially when navigating the messiness of adulthood.

Hooooo boy. What a book. What a magnificent masterpiece of a book. I’m not this will be a review, so much as me rambling and spewing thoughts. I think a lot of people went into this one expecting it to be a romcom type of book. However, it is more of a coming of age/exploration of adulthood with some romance. The main focus is Grace and her journey, rather than the romance (though that is definitely a part of her journey). I just. Ugh. Reading this as someone who is nearing the end of an astrophysics PhD (like Grace) and experiencing burnout, depression, and anxiety (like Grace) hit so me so hard. It really made me feel SEEN.