Breakaway Books

Authored by Katie Sturino; Published June 2025; Romance

⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️🏖️

Sunny Side Up is all too easy to picture as a lighthearted rom-com blockbuster. It has all the key features: the girl gang that surrounds the heroine, the suave guy (who is not the right guy), and the delightfully awkward (right) guy.

Sunny *did* have everything figured out: the husband, the job, the condo. But when her husband divorces her just a few months after the wedding, and she sets off to find a new place on her own, she feels a little lost and a lot hopeless about love. With her two new divorcee besties, she fights her own body negativity and tries to find a date for her brother’s wedding, just a few months away. Two gorgeous guys and enormous business success later, her problems are entirely different—but no less painful. 

This is a novel about a plus-sized heroine, and the vast majority of it revolves around that, especially the more emotionally charged moments. I gasped at the comments that both strangers and loved ones felt like they could make to her about her body. Despite these challenges, Sunny’s inner monologue is almost unnervingly positive, able to grasp the negative narrative she is spinning for herself and reframe it in a positive light, even at times when I would have felt sure I was headed for a breakdown. I imagine that many other women my age feel an especially deep empathy for Sunny, what with her mother’s constant hints that she needs to lose weight and that she has screwed up letting her husband walk out the door. Yet even with her mom’s prodding, Sunny doesn’t lose it, and it almost made me wish that she would. Part of me thinks that her mother (and a host of other folks) deserved it. Her internal narration feels, at times, almost cloyingly positive.

Even when dealing with serious body image issues, the novel is still very much a rom-com, with all of its detachment from reality. Sunny’s success in business comes to her remarkably quickly with few obstacles, two incredibly hot guys present themselves in her life just a few months after her divorce, and she has a perfect fairy godmother figure in the form of her assistant Avery. Really, it is the men that struck me as the most unrealistic: the silver fox who proves to be incredibly two-faced, and the postman who may as well have sprung out of Sunny’s dreams. I could practically see who would be cast in the Hollywood adaptation of this novel. Her ex-husband, of course, also proves to be a conveniently malicious and shallow (one-dimensional?) villain. But ultimately, all of these factors just make it into a romp of a rom-com, with simple, clear heroes who were easy to root for.

Sunny Side Up is a great romance to pick up if you’re looking for a message of body acceptance, but perhaps not a particularly complex plot or characters.