Genre 📚: YA/NA Contemporary, Romance
Tropes 💁♀️: Second chance romance, Small town romance, Revenge, Dual timeline
Rep ✔️: Hispanic main character, BIPOC and queer side characters
CW ⚠️: Emotionally distant parent, depression, body image issues
Rating ⭐️: 5/5
The DRAMA. The SCANDAL. The YEARNING. Ooh, girl, the yearning. In Eva Des Lauriers’ sophomore novel, we follow the former lovers and recent high school grads Clara and Reid — one stuck in their hometown, the other stressed at Stanford, both of them miserable. Their town has a “Legacy” program (a scholarship given to the best of the best students), and the Legacies are invited back for a big event, bringing Clara, Reid, and all their friends and enemies back together.
Clara and Reid are still heartbroken over the way they left things off, and that heartbreak picks right back up as soon as they reunite. If that wasn’t bad enough, there’s an anonymous social media account calling out all the Legacies and revealing all their secrets, Gossip Girl style. It’s quite a juicy mystery, with plenty of fun twists and turns. What I loved about it, though, was that the secret dumping forced our characters to sit back and truly see how much pressure they were under.
And, again, the YEARNING. Agh, Eva is a master at yearnology. I was in love with her main couple by chapter one, NEEDING them back together by chapter two. They had the intense kind of romance, with butterflies, heat… a beautiful mutual understanding. They also had mutual misunderstandings, which thankfully, their friends gave them shit for. Sometimes you just need a bestie to smack you and say, “You love him, you idiot.”
**Much thanks to NetGalley and Henry Holt and Co. for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review. I’m Gonna Get You Back will be released on May 19, 2026.
Sara Bechtol 