Review: On Loverose Lane by Samantha Young (Return to Dublin Street #1)

Note: An advance reader copy (ARC) was provided by the author.

Spin-off series featuring the next generation of characters from a beloved pioneer series tend to make me a wee bit anxious. Will the new one be as good as the previous one? Will I be as emotionally invested with the second generation cast of characters as I had been with their parents? Well, if On Loverose Lane sets the bar for the Return to Dublin Street spin-off, then Samantha Young is off to a fantastic start. If you're a longtime reader of Young's, then it would be near impossible for you to have not read On Dublin Street, the book that started it all for the author. And if you've read it, then you know very well who Braden Carmichael and Jocelyn Butler--aka Braden and Joss, and still one of my all-time favorite fictional couples--are. Their oldest daughter, Beth, now gets her own chance at her happily-ever-after, and it's a friends-to-possibly more-to-enemies, grumpy/sunshine, second chance, fake dating, sports romance with a hot professional football player named Callan who lives in the same building as she does.

The last person twenty-four-year-old Beth Carmichael expected to see moving into her apartment building is also the first boy  who wasn't family that she ever cared about--Callan Keen. It's been eight years since she last saw him, but that doesn't mean she isn't aware of how far Callan has come. Now twenty-five, he's the captain of Caledonia United and one of the top midfielders in the Scottish Professional Football League. On the other hand, Beth has done well for herself, too, as owner of Social Queens, a social media management company that caters to smaller businesses. However, it looks like time doesn't heal all wounds, not where Callan is concerned, who makes it clear that he wants nothing to do with Beth, nor does he want his friends engaging with her either. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and with Beth needing Callan to lock down a potential new client and him needing her to secure a meeting with her dad, they become not-so-strange bedfellows...literally AND proverbially.

I adore a well-written grumpy/sunshine romance, and with Beth and Callan sharing a past when they were teenagers, there's an additional dimension of interest. These two gave as good as they got, and the verbal tussles they would get into was wholly entertaining, especially since it felt like foreplay to me. I understood why Callan was as hurt as he was by what Beth did eight years prior, and I also got why Beth felt like she had to handle her discovery in the manner she chose. They were, after all, teenagers back then. This gave me a better appreciation for how their relationship grew and evolved in their mid-twenties. It was also fun having the OGs around, aka those couples who found their happily-ever-afters in the original series, as well as meeting the second generation plus Callan's teammates who were also his closest friends, Baird and John. There was a fair bit of humor and some angst as well, and a whole lot of heat and heart that I thoroughly enjoyed. On Loverose Lane gets five stars, and I can't wait for book two!

Release Date: 20 February 2025

Date Read: 14 February 2025

Learn more about Samantha Young.

Pre-order On Loverose Lane on Amazon.