Things We Never Got Over

Things We Never Got Over is enormous, untidy, and more convincing about finding a community than finding a man.

I mean that as a compliment, with a pencil mark beside enormous. Lucy Score gives Naomi Witt the sort of first day that makes a person want to crawl back into bed for a fiscal year, then keeps filling the town with people who may or may not make her life easier. The romance works because the town does. I would move to Knockemout for the neighbours. I might ask for a little more information before accepting a lift from Knox.

What kept me reading was Naomi's exhaustion. Her kindness is often treated as a resource everybody else may draw on, and the novel is alert to the cost of being the competent one. Knox Morgan enters as a gloriously bad answer to an already difficult week: a man who offers help in the same tone other people use to refuse it. I laughed, I winced, and I wanted both of them to sit down and use their words before the book gained another hundred pages.

The premise (no spoilers past Naomi meeting her niece)

Naomi has fled her wedding and come to Knockemout, Virginia, to help her estranged twin, Tina. Tina takes Naomi's car and money, leaving behind a niece Naomi did not know existed. The girl is eleven. Naomi has no settled plan and suddenly has someone else to protect. Knox, a barber who values his solitary life, wants no part of the complication but decides to help her through the immediate crisis. This is the opening bargain of Things We Never Got Over, the first Knockemout book, published in 2022.

There is a built-in imbalance here that gives the story its bite. Knox belongs to the town; Naomi has arrived with neither her possessions nor a reliable account of who is on her side. Score makes place into a source of help and scrutiny at once. When everyone knows everyone, community can look suspiciously like being watched by an affectionate committee. I found that both comforting and faintly alarming.

What works

Score has a gift for the crowded room. A smaller romance might make Knox the only answer to Naomi's troubles. Here, other relationships matter, and the book's emotional argument is that care should be a network rather than a rescue package delivered by one attractive barber. That makes the romance feel less isolated from real life. Naomi is not an empty space awaiting a man. She has an urgent responsibility, a history of trying to fix things for others, and a future she has not yet had time to picture.

The eleven-year-old niece changes the rhythm in a useful way. Her presence means every romantic gesture has to coexist with groceries, safety, and decisions that cannot be postponed for a flirtation. I like a love story that understands a grand speech is less valuable than showing up when the ordinary work begins. Knox can be difficult, but his practical attention is the most persuasive case the book makes for him. The man is easier to believe when he is useful than when he is growling.

The dialogue moves quickly, with a small-town chorus forever ready to turn a private problem into public business. That is where Score's humour comes from: two people attempting to maintain dignity while their surroundings refuse to grant them any. Naomi's composure makes a fine target for comic disruption, and Knox's determined solitude is inherently funny in a place that appears to have never heard of leaving someone alone. The book is long enough to create habits and repeated encounters, which gives warmth a chance to accumulate.

I also appreciate that the romantic fantasy includes being believed. Naomi is dropped into a mess she did not make. The attraction gains force when someone begins to see the difference between her ability to cope and her desire to keep coping forever. That recognition is sexier than any speech about protection. It is the point at which help might become partnership, provided Knox remembers to ask.

What's polarising

At 560 pages in the publisher's paperback listing, this is a substantial stay in Knockemout. I enjoyed the social sprawl until I occasionally felt the novel finding one more errand for Naomi because the town was not ready to let me leave. Side characters, jokes, and complications keep arriving after the central dynamic is established. If you like your romances edited to the bone, you may begin looking for the exit sign well before the last page.

Knox is an acquired taste with a beard. His brusqueness is written as both a flaw and a flirtation, and the balance will not work for everyone. Sometimes I found his help tender; sometimes I wanted to ask whether Naomi had consented to the terms of this unsolicited improvement programme. The book knows she can stand up for herself, yet a grumpy hero's certainty can still swallow the room. Readers who want a gentler courtship may not find the later warmth sufficient payment for the early irritation.

The tonal range is another gamble. The title sounds melancholy, the opening is comic chaos, and the story carries a child's precarious situation alongside adult heat. Score is asking you to accept a broad, sometimes noisy mixture. I largely did, but the shifts can make danger feel more sudden than the surrounding banter prepares you for. This is not a quaint village tale with a few suggestive glances over the bakery counter.

The Knox of it

Knox's defining talent is treating a boundary as a personality. He says he wants peace, then keeps appearing near Naomi's problems. That contradiction is the engine of the romance. He is funniest when his actions expose how little he understands his own motives, and most attractive when he offers concrete support without demanding gratitude on the spot.

Still, do not mistake a capable fixer for an automatically good partner. Naomi needs room to decide what she wants after a life of meeting other people's needs. The book is strongest when Knox's certainty runs into her agency and has to slow down. I wanted more of that pause. Grumpiness can be charming; listening is the actual love language.

Spice and heat

The heat is 4 of 5, explicit open door. This is an adult romance with sex on the page, not a cosy small-town story that merely blushes at the possibility. The physical relationship has real space in a novel that also spends plenty of time on caretaking and town life. If you came for only the latter, expect the bedroom door to remain very open.

Content notes: child neglect, abandonment, recalled domestic abuse, a parent's substance addiction, gun violence, and kidnapping. The early set-up already puts an eleven-year-old in an unstable situation; the darker material should not be mistaken for part of the joke.

Who it's for

Read this if you want your grumpy-sunshine romance with a fully staffed town, a capable heroine who is running out of patience, and a hero whose best argument is what he does when nobody is applauding. You will be especially happy if found family matters as much to you as the central couple. There are enough people here to fill a wedding and then complain about the seating plan.

Pass if you want a tight weekend read or a hero who communicates beautifully from his first appearance. I would recommend Things We Never Got Over to a friend who enjoys getting attached to a place; I would tell that friend to pack a bag. Knockemout is not a short visit.

Books like Things We Never Got Over

• In a Jam by Kate Canterbary, for small-town caretaking, an unexpected family role, and a heroine whose plans need rewriting.
• The Simple Wild by K.A. Tucker, for an outsider learning a difficult place and a prickly man on its own terms.
• The Fine Art of Faking It by Lucy Score, for a nosy community, a long-running local feud, and romance complicated by everybody having an opinion.

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