Submission 3978

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Author: Ali Hazelwood

Published: 2025

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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There are feelings you know, from the very beginning, are going to complicate everything. Maya Killgore has been carrying one of those feelings for longer than she would like to admit — and when a Sicilian wedding forces her into a week of unavoidable proximity with the man at the centre of it, the complications she has been quietly managing become impossible to ignore. Problematic Summer Romance is Ali Hazelwood at her most sun-drenched and self-aware: a novel that leans into every cliché it is built upon, then dismantles them with intelligence and warmth. Set against the extraordinary backdrop of Taormina's ancient coastline, it is a story about the feelings we talk ourselves out of, the people who resist us for reasons we do not yet understand, and the particular magic of a summer that changes everything.

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Maya Killgore is twenty-three and navigating that particular stretch of adulthood where everything feels simultaneously possible and uncertain. She is in graduate school, working out who she is and what she wants, carrying her ambitions and her anxieties in roughly equal measure. And she has, for longer than is probably wise, been unable to stop thinking about Conor Harkness. Conor is thirty-eight. He is her brother Eli's closest friend, a successful figure in the biotech world, and a man who has made his position on Maya abundantly clear: she is someone he would prefer to keep at a significant distance. He is guarded in the way that people are when they have built their walls deliberately rather than accidentally, and his coolness toward Maya is consistent enough to sting. She cannot entirely account for it. She is not sure she wants to. Then Eli announces he is getting married — to Rue, in Taormina, Sicily — and suddenly Maya and Conor are sharing a villa on the Ionian coast for over a week, surrounded by ancient ruins, exceptional food, and the kind of Mediterranean beauty that makes emotional restraint feel faintly absurd. Hazelwood constructs the Sicilian setting with genuine sensory pleasure. The landscape is not simply decorative — it functions as a permission structure, a space outside ordinary life where the usual rules feel less binding, and the feelings you have been filing away become harder to suppress. Maya arrives in Sicily already in quiet conflict with herself. She knows the situation is complicated. The age gap is real, the power differential is real, and Conor has been nothing but clear about his position. And yet. What gradually emerges — across shared meals, accidental intimacies, and the slow unravelling of a wedding that is not going entirely to plan — is that Conor's distance may not mean what Maya has assumed it does. He has his reasons. They are not what she expected. And as the week progresses and the barriers between them begin to soften, the novel shifts from romantic comedy tension into something with genuine emotional stakes. The wedding chaos surrounding them provides both comic texture and narrative momentum, and the ensemble of family and friends — particularly Eli and Rue, whose relationship runs alongside the central romance as a warm counterpoint — gives the story a community and a rootedness that prevents it from floating away entirely on Sicilian sunshine. This is a novel aware of its own conventions, winking at them while it delivers exactly what it promises.

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- "The gap between perception and reality": Much of the novel's romantic tension rests on the distance between what Maya reads in Conor's behaviour and what is actually driving it. His coldness is not what it appears to be, and the slow revelation of his true position is the story's central emotional movement. Hazelwood is making a broader point here: that the stories we construct about other people's indifference are very often wrong, and that fear frequently wears the face of rejection. - "Age, power, and the ethics of desire": The novel does not sidestep the complications of its central dynamic — it engages with them directly and repeatedly, sometimes to the point of friction. The fifteen-year gap and the structural imbalances it creates are treated as real rather than cosmetic, and Conor's awareness of them is part of what makes him a more considered love interest than the genre often provides. Whether the novel resolves these tensions entirely satisfyingly is a question readers will answer differently, but the willingness to ask them honestly is worth noting. - "Resilience and self-possession in your twenties": Maya is not simply a younger woman waiting to be chosen by an older man. She is a fully realised protagonist navigating genuine professional and personal pressures, and her confidence — earned rather than assumed — is one of the novel's most engaging qualities. Her arc is not about becoming worthy of Conor's attention. It is about recognising her own worth independently of whether he offers it. - "Found family and the love that surrounds the love story": Eli and Rue are, for many readers, the novel's most uncomplicated pleasure. Their relationship — warm, genuine, and entirely without the push-and-pull that characterises the central romance — provides emotional grounding and a reminder that the story is about more than its central couple. The community of characters that surrounds Maya is a source of sustenance, not just scenery. - "The transformative potential of displacement": Sicily matters. Being removed from the context of your ordinary life — from your routines, your roles, your habitual ways of protecting yourself — creates the conditions under which change becomes possible. Both Maya and Conor are different people in Taormina than they are anywhere else, and the novel is quietly interested in why that is and what it means.

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- Conor's initial coldness is the novel's most discussed element, and for good reason. He arrives in the story as someone genuinely difficult to like, and Hazelwood commits to that difficulty rather than softening it for early palatability. The payoff — understanding why he has been the way he has — is more satisfying for having been made to wait for it. He earns his redemption rather than simply receiving it. - Maya herself is a protagonist whose intelligence and self-awareness set her apart. She knows what she feels. She knows the complications. She goes in anyway, not from recklessness but from a kind of courageous honesty about her own desires that is genuinely refreshing. She does not play games. She does not pretend. In a genre full of misunderstandings that could be resolved with a single conversation, her directness is its own form of relief. - The Sicilian setting is rendered with enough specificity — the ruins, the caves, the particular quality of light on the Ionian coast — to feel like a destination rather than a backdrop. Readers who have been to Taormina will recognise it. Readers who have not will want to go. - Eli and Rue's wedding functions simultaneously as a plot engine, a comic set piece, and an emotional anchor. The chaos surrounding it keeps the narrative moving, but the relationship at its centre — easy, loving, and uncomplicated in the ways the main romance is not — provides the novel with its warmest scenes and its most unambiguous emotional satisfaction. - The visit after the breakup — a small, seemingly minor scene — is the kind of quietly significant moment that romance novels live and die by. It reveals character in a way that grand gestures cannot, and it lands with a sweetness entirely disproportionate to its apparent scale.

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Problematic Summer Romance is for readers who want their summer romance to have something to say — who appreciate the slow burn, enjoy watching two people resist each other with insufficient conviction, and find a well-rendered European setting as emotionally important as the central relationship. If the combination of sunshine, tension, and a love interest who starts as hard work and becomes worth it sounds like exactly your genre, this delivers. Readers who have followed Hazelwood's previous work will find familiar pleasures here — the wit, the self-awareness, the STEM-inflected character dynamics — alongside a setting and emotional register that feels like a genuine expansion. The novel is also notably warmer in its ensemble than some of its predecessors, and readers who respond strongly to found family dynamics will find Eli and Rue's storyline as rewarding as the central romance, if not more so. A note of honest guidance: the age gap and power dynamic are not merely incidental to the plot — they are discussed with a frequency and directness that some readers will find refreshingly honest, and others may find repetitive. If you are the kind of reader who prefers the complications to be gestured at rather than examined, this novel will occasionally test your patience. If you are the kind who wants the story to take its own premises seriously, you will find that quality here. Either way, Taormina awaits — and it is, in every respect, worth the trip.

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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.