Genre 📚: Adult Contemporary, Romance
Tropes 💁♀️: Age gap romance, Single dad, Forced proximity
Rep ✔️: Queer side characters
CW ⚠️: Descriptive sex scenes, abandonment, emotionally distant parent
Rating ⭐️: 4/5
I’m a little unsettled by how much I relate to this FMC… Sam has been living with her mom since the pandemic, since she graduated college (studying the arts, no less). She’s basically living on autopilot, waiting for a grad school opportunity that she’s not sure will come. On top of that, she’s living with boxes and boxes of vintage comic books that her asshole absent father left her with. So, yeah. She’s got old X-Men issues and daddy issues.
Then, Sam meets her new neighbor, Nick — a forty-year-old single dad who seems to be a (gasp!) genuinely good dad. And you know what? I appreciate the fact that, while she is intrigued by him, she doesn’t fall into instalove/instalust. They build a sweet and charming rapport, which grows into an unexpectedly deep connection. I was pleasantly surprised by how real and honest they were with each other.
Their romance did progress rather quickly, but I totally believed it. I loved them, I loved Sam finding the joy in life again. Even if she couldn’t be the perfect artist or the perfect prodigy daughter she always wanted to be, she could still be perfectly happy. And, man, did that feel good to read. I never thought a single dad romance would hit me that hard.
**Much thanks to NetGalley and The Dial Press for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review. Daddy Issues will be released on November 18, 2025.
Sara Bechtol 