"He's the one who destroyed me, and I'm too smart to let that happen again."
That line hit me somewhere around hour two, walking the lakefront with Denise on one of those late October evenings when Chicago decides it's already December. The wind was coming off the lake hard enough to make my eyes water - or maybe that was just Rebecca Yarros doing what she does. Either way, Denise asked why I'd gone quiet, and I had to admit I was fully invested in the romantic entanglements of a fictional snowboarder named Landon Rhodes. Twenty years teaching Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and here I am, emotionally compromised by a guy whose nickname is Nova.
This reminds me of what Hemingway said about writing - that the dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. Yarros gets that. The surface of Nova is a second-chance romance between a reckless professional snowboarder and the woman he wrecked years ago. Underneath? It's about the stories we tell ourselves to justify never being vulnerable again.
The Slow Burn That Actually Earns Its Heat
Let's talk about what Yarros is really doing with Landon and Rachel. This isn't just will-they-won't-they strung out for dramatic effect - though I'll get to the people who feel it is. The push-pull between these two has a specific rhythm: Landon reaches, Rachel retreats, and every time she retreats it's because she's remembering something concrete he did, not just some vague heartbreak. The specificity of their history makes each step forward feel earned rather than engineered.
Now. Some listeners found that rhythm repetitive. And I get it - there are stretches in the middle third where you're thinking, "Okay, we've done this dance. Someone commit." The push-pull cycles maybe three times more than it needs to. If you loved the pacing of Yarros's The Last Letter, you might feel the emotional stakes here are spread thinner across more pages. But here's the thing - when the tension finally breaks, when these two stop performing their damage for each other, it lands. The payoff works precisely because of the buildup, even if the buildup tests your patience. The slow-burn patience required here reminded me of what I went through with Last Time I Lied, where the withholding of information does similar work - you're frustrated right up until you're not.
Lee Samuels Understands That Pause Is Punctuation
I need to talk about Lee Samuels's performance. The man holds silence in Landon's POV sections the way a good actor holds a beat before the line that matters. There's this quality to his delivery during the broody introspective moments where you can hear Landon thinking, actually thinking, not just narrating his own feelings at you. It's a subtle thing. A lesser narrator would push the angst. Samuels lets it sit.
Muffy Newtown handles Rachel with the right amount of guarded intelligence - she doesn't play her as wounded, she plays her as someone who rebuilt herself and isn't about to let the guy who broke her watch her demolition a second time. The dual narration here is smart casting. You get two distinct emotional registers for two people circling the same wound from opposite sides.
I listened at 1.0x because - as my students love to mock me for - the author chose those words. And at regular speed, you catch the shifts in vocal temperature between scenes. Samuels gets warmer, literally warmer in tone, when Landon is around Rachel versus the bravado he performs for everyone else. That's not just reading. That's interpretation.
My Students Would Hate This. I Love It.
Look, this is book two in the Renegades series, and it carries that second-book energy - you're expected to already care about these people's world, the extreme sports backdrop, the friend group dynamics. If you haven't listened to Wilder first, you'll pick things up fine, but you'll miss some of the emotional shorthand. The plot twists - and there are a couple that genuinely surprised me - work better with the series context.
Is it literature? My grad school self would say no. But my grad school self also thought audiobooks were cheating, so what did he know? Yarros writes contemporary romance with a literary sensibility about damage and repair that I respect. The prose isn't Faulkner, but it doesn't need to be. It knows exactly what it is.
The sexual content is present and explicit enough that I'd have paused it if Denise's mom had been walking with us. Fair warning.
Who Should Listen (And Who Should Skip)
If you're a second-chance romance fan who can tolerate a middle act that takes its time - and who appreciates dual narration that actually justifies the two-narrator approach - this one's for you. Skip it if repetitive push-pull dynamics make you impatient, or if you need your romances to clock in under eight hours. And if you haven't read Wilder, maybe start there.
Worth Pausing the Faculty Meeting For
Here's where I land: Nova is a well-executed slow burn with narration that elevates the material, hampered slightly by a middle act that could've been tighter. It does exactly what the best second-chance romances do - it makes you understand why two people who hurt each other would be foolish enough to try again. Yarros trusts her readers to sit with discomfort, and Samuels and Newtown trust the silences between the words. At nearly twelve hours, it's a commitment. But the good parts - and there are plenty - make the slower stretches worth weathering.
