Breakaway Books

Authored by Rainbow Rowell; Published April 2026; Romance

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️

I’m not quite sure how Rainbow Rowell did it, but Cherry Baby manages to be both heart-rendingly realistic and lovely enough to fill me up with joy. It’s rare to find both in the same novel.

In Cherry Baby, the titular Cherry is poised to enter a new life, leaving her soon-to-be-ex-husband Tom behind as his webcomic rockets him into stardom. Separating two lives is, unfortunately, more difficult than she had hoped, especially when she is the inspiration behind one of the main characters in his famous comic and now his famous movie. It’s even more difficult when her plus-size body makes her all too easy to recognize. But when Cherry’s college crush Russ walks into her life, she’s hoping that it might be simpler than she thought. 

I think this novel might contain the nicest possible version of a love triangle. Cherry’s two suitors never meet face-to-face, although they are peripherally aware of each other, and both men seem to genuinely want what is best for Cherry. A consequence of this arrangement is that it’s difficult to know which one to ship. Like real life, there doesn’t seem to be a clear-cut first choice: just two different paths. Also disturbingly similar to real life are the fights that Cherry has with both men. I cringed reading them because, well, I got it. I understood why Cherry was picking the fights, and I understood why the two men wouldn’t give in. It made for painful reading, but refreshing as well. Cherry is a real woman, with real pain, trying to do the real best thing for her.

Looming over the entire novel is the body size of Cherry, her sisters, and her mother. They are all fat, in their own words, and each deals with it in their own way, but they all appear to have embraced what they cannot change. It affects their health, but it also affects how they move through the world, and it permeates all of Cherry’s romantic interactions, from middle school through her marriage. Sometimes, my heart broke for Cherry because of this, and other times, I shook my head at her stubbornness, but I always appreciated the perspective it gave me. When Cherry’s oldest sister starts taking a GLP-1, a firestorm of family drama breaks out, and it feels like the sisters’ argument over it is a microcosm of all the debates we’re having in society around this issue.

Cherry Baby has some of the same swoon-value as any good beach read romance, but it has a lot more ambiguity and reality. I was surprised by how much I loved the combination.