August Lane

"Regina Black is magic. I was mad at Luke Randall and his creator before I hit Page 1 – I knew he had made his career stealing credit from the heroine the book is named after. And I was supposed to root for him, for them? Well, I fell deeply in love with that “sober drunk,” his tender aching heart and the “deep, smoky tone he’d been told gave his voice more swagger” right alongside August. Plus, like Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter come to life, this masterful novel wraps bittersweet second-chance love and family loss around nuanced lessons about the overlooked and misappropriated legacy of Black women in country music. The result is the most snot-inducing, truly and swooningly romantic novel I’ve read in a long, long while."