Submission 2568

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Author: Sarah Adams

Published: 2023

Genre: Romance

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This book is handpicked by the IBC Editorial Team. If you are an author, publisher, or reader and would like to have a book reviewed by IBC, you may reach us at editorial@indianbookclub.com — we’ll be happy to review it.

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Some people spend their lives being exactly who everyone needs them to be — and quietly wonder if anyone will ever love who they actually are. Annie Walker has built something genuinely beautiful in Rome, Kentucky: a flower shop, a community, a life rooted in warmth and intention. The only thing missing is someone to share it with. When a careless comment from a failed date sends her spiralling into self-doubt, Annie decides the solution is reinvention — and the person she recruits to help her is the one person who was supposed to keep his distance. Practice Makes Perfect is a small-town romance with real emotional intelligence beneath its charm: a story about the difference between performing for love and simply being worthy of it, and the unexpected person who helps you see that distinction clearly.

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Annie Walker is, by most measures, living a lovely life. She runs a flower shop in the kind of town where everyone knows your name and means it warmly; she is surrounded by people she loves, and she carries herself with a quiet contentment that most people spend years trying to manufacture. What she does not have is a romantic partner — and after overhearing a date describe her as unbelievably boring, she begins to wonder if the problem is not her circumstances but herself. It is the kind of comment that lodges somewhere deep and refuses to leave. Annie, who has always drawn comfort from her routines and her flowers and her favourite romance films, finds herself questioning whether the life she has built is actually limiting rather than lovely. Is she too quiet? Too settled? Too much of herself and not enough of whoever it is that inspires romantic feelings in other people? Her solution is both logical and, in the way of all the best romantic comedy premises, spectacularly inadvisable: she will learn to be more. And she has the perfect tutor in mind. Will Griffin is back in Rome temporarily, providing security for Amelia Rose ahead of her wedding to Annie's brother Noah. He is tattooed, guarded, and has made a very clear personal rule about not forming attachments to this town or the people in it. He has his reasons. They are, as it turns out, worth understanding. What Will does not plan for is Annie — specifically, Annie asking him to help her become the kind of woman who does not get described as boring. He wants to say no. He knows, with a certainty he cannot entirely explain, that the version of Annie she is trying to become is not an improvement on the one that already exists. But he cannot bring himself to refuse her, and so the lessons begin. Adams constructs their dynamic with a lightness of touch that keeps the novel moving even as its emotional stakes quietly accumulate. The practice dates are funny and tender in equal measure. The dual perspective — we move between Annie's and Will's points of view — gives the reader access to feelings that neither character is yet willing to speak aloud, which creates exactly the kind of delicious romantic tension the genre does best. You know where this is going. The pleasure is entirely in how it gets there. As the lessons progress, Annie discovers that Will's stoicism is not indifference — it is protection, carefully maintained around a backstory that has given him every reason to keep moving and no experience of a reason to stay. And Will discovers that Annie does not need to be different. She needs someone who sees her clearly. Those two discoveries, arriving at their own pace, in their own time, make for a romance that earns its ending rather than simply arriving at it.

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- "The difference between changing for love and changing because of it": The novel's central tension is not simply whether Annie and Will will get together — it is whether Annie will realise that the growth she is seeking does not require her to become someone else. The most moving thing the story does is trace the distinction between performing confidence for other people's approval and developing it genuinely, for yourself, because someone believed in you enough to reflect it. - "Being seen versus being liked": Annie's romantic problem is not that she is boring. It is that she has been dating people who cannot see her properly. The novel makes a quiet but persistent argument that being truly known — with all your routines and your flowers and your love of quiet evenings — is more valuable than being broadly appealing. Will does not fall for a version of Annie she has constructed. He falls for the one that was already there. - "Emotional guardedness and the cost of self-protection": Will's backstory gives his reluctance a weight that lifts the novel above its lighter comic surface. His decision to remain unattached is not carelessness — it is the result of experience, and Adams treats it with appropriate seriousness. His arc, from a man committed to leaving to one who considers staying, is handled with a patience that makes it genuinely satisfying. - "Small-town belonging as emotional foundation": Rome, Kentucky, is not simply a setting — it is a character, and one of the novel's most affecting arguments. The community Annie has built around herself, the relationships that predate and surround the central romance, are presented as the infrastructure of a good life rather than a consolation prize. The novel values rootedness in a way that feels increasingly rare and quietly radical. - "Love that asks you to grow, not to disappear": The novel's most generous idea is its final one: that the right relationship does not demand you abandon who you are, but it might ask you to become more fully yourself. Both Annie and Will arrive at the end of the story changed — not reshaped, but expanded.

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- Annie's flower shop functions as an emotional shorthand throughout the novel — a space that is entirely hers, that reflects her sensibility and her care, and that serves as a constant reminder of what she has built when self-doubt is telling her it is not enough. There is something genuinely moving about a heroine whose passion is growing things. - The overheard comment that sets the plot in motion is small and cruel in the particular way that small cruelties are — not dramatic enough to be obviously significant, but lodged too deep to shake loose easily. Adams handles it with realism: Annie does not collapse under it, but she does not simply shrug it off either. It finds the crack that was already there. - Will's patience with Annie is the romantic core of the novel. He does not try to fast-forward her confidence or redirect her toward a version of herself he finds more convenient. He simply pays attention, consistently and without agenda, until she begins to pay the same quality of attention to herself. That is, quietly, the most romantic thing in the book. - The dual POV structure is deployed with real skill. Knowing what Will feels while watching him withhold it from Annie creates a tenderness in the reader that the story earns rather than demands. His chapters add emotional depth that a single perspective would have flattened. - Noah and Amelia, returning from an earlier instalment in the series, ground the novel in a sense of continuity and community. Their presence is not merely fan service — it reinforces the novel's central argument that Rome, Kentucky, is a place worth staying for, and that love, once it takes root here, tends to last.

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Practice Makes Perfect is for readers who want their romance warm rather than wild — the kind of story that leaves you feeling genuinely good rather than emotionally wrung out, without ever feeling thin or unconsidered. It is comfort reading in the best sense: deliberately crafted, emotionally honest, and generous with its characters in a way that mirrors how it hopes its readers will be generous with themselves. Readers who find small-town settings irresistible will be comprehensively charmed by Rome, Kentucky — it is the kind of fictional place that inspires the particular, slightly embarrassing longing of wanting to actually live there. Those coming to the series for the first time will find the novel entirely accessible as a standalone, though prior acquaintance with Noah and Amelia will add a layer of satisfaction. A gentle note of realistic expectation: this is not a novel that reaches for darkness or complexity. Its pleasures are lighter and warmer than that, and it knows it. Readers seeking high-stakes drama or intricate plotting will find themselves in the wrong place entirely. But readers who have ever felt described too simply, loved too shallowly, or seen only partially by someone who should have looked harder — readers who recognise something of themselves in Annie's very particular and very human doubt — will find something here that is, in its quiet way, exactly what they needed.

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This review is part of the Indian Book Club’s editorial initiative to spotlight books that inspire, inform, and leave a lasting impact on readers. Every title featured is carefully handpicked and reviewed by the IBC Editorial Team to maintain quality, authenticity, and literary value. If you are an author, publisher, or reader and would like to submit a book for review, we’d be delighted to hear from you. Please write to us at: editorial@indianbookclub.com Our team personally evaluates each submission, and selected books are featured as official IBC Editorial Reviews on our platform.