Breakaway Books

Authored by Ashley Poston; Published June 2025; Romance

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️🏖️

Are you missing summer? The beaches, the boardwalks, the sandy toes? If you want to relive the idyllic, hot days of July and August, Sounds Like Love may fit the bill.

In Sounds Like Love, songwriter Joni has hit it big with her most recent song, but she is tapped out. For almost a year—a year of dealing with her mom’s descent into dementia from across the country—she hasn’t felt the slightest spark of inspiration. After a chance meeting with an ex-pop star, Joni starts to hear a literal voice in head, along with a melody that she just can’t shake. To get rid of the persistent ear worm, she must partner with the voice in her head to finish the song. Will it finally bring her the inspiration that she’s been looking for?

While this may be a romance novel, the author’s focus isn’t really the relationship between Joni and her beau. It’s Joni and her struggle to come to terms with losing her mother to dementia, as well as her conflicted feelings about her goals in life. It’s about the decision to leave home and chase your dreams—or to stay and be present with family. (Home is the idyllic Outer Banks, so you certainly get your fill of summer fun as Joni visits her family.) So much of the emotional energy of this book is Joni dealing with the rest of her life with the counsel of and at times even through the lens of her romantic partner Sasha. The romance itself seems almost secondary. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; there are still plenty of moments of beautiful connection between Joni and Sasha. It just makes this a different type of romance novel.

The strange quirk of this novel—that Joni and Sasha can hear each other’s thoughts—definitely threw me at first. It seemed like an unnecessarily complicated way to force the two together, but it also eliminated the overused trope of the “major” obstacle between the pair being a mere misunderstanding. The author doesn’t present even a half-hearted explanation for their telepathy, despite the clear confusion of both characters. Yet, even having access to Sasha’s thoughts, I don’t feel like I learned much about who he is beyond his attachment to his mother and his antipathy toward his father, and these traits alone are not enough to endear him to me. What I did grow to love is the setting: a small town on the Outer Banks, featuring ice cream stands and frequent beach trips. Despite the fact that I was curled up with this novel in the autumn, it almost made me long for summer. 

Sounds Like Love is a little offbeat for a romance novel, but if you’re looking for something different in a beach setting, it may fit the bill.