4.5 stars

This is hands down my favorite Kate Clayborn book. I found her prior female MC’s a little too manic fun quirky girl for my taste and the male MC’s were all so successful straight men. But while we have a dose of each in Georgie and Levi, we also get a much more real (to me) version. Georgie has moved back to her parents’ home in Virginia after ending her PA life in California. She doesn’t know what’s next and feels a lot lost. Levi is the black sheep of his successful rich local perfect family who is making his own way. They find each other and both get help from the other to help them a bit more on their life journeys. Nothing is totally solved (which I liked) but they’re on their way. I also found the best friend relationship of Georgie and Bel so real and absolutely worth mentioning in the review because gosh darn I love ride or die best friends who know you inside and out and for whom you would do absolutely anything and who will cheer for you no matter what. And I also feel family strife and relationships so acutely and it’s so well done here. I turned to my friend crying as I was reading and said “there’s sibling stuff in here” and, as a good friend, she knew what I meant. Really enjoyable and totally my fave Kate Clayborn. So excited for y’all to get a chance to read it in February!

This ARC was provided by NetGalley and Kensington Books in exchange for an honest review.

It's no surprise that this book is...wonderful. I struggled with that one-word description, because how do I capture a romance that is thoughtful and kind, with characters who are doing the work to become better people and have healthy relationships and lives, in one word? Kate continues to offer honest and raw contemporary romances, with heart and emotions and heat and humour and I can go on and on, but the gist is that you should read this.

My heart is bursting!!!!

Honestly, Clayborn is a wordsmith, the wordsmith, the OG, the lyrical genius.
I could possibly go on and on but I wont.
I swear each of her books get better and better and I am here for all of it.

This one was sweet, mellow, and Georgie---- she was one of the best MC's I have read in a long time.

So thrilled I got to read this one early!!!

Thank you Netgalley!!!

Mare~Slitsread

This was a fabulous book!! I loved everything about it!! The characters were sweet and I loved the interaction between them. Kate Clayborn is always a charming read and this book wasn't any different. I would recommend to others.

I’m a huge fan of Kate Clayborn. I love all of her books—they each have their own personalities and heartwarming endings. But I have a confession to make…this might be my new favourite of hers. It’s so beautiful, and gut-wrenchingly honest, and o-m-g, the swoon.

This is more than a romance book, this is a journey of Georgie finding herself. But it’s also more than that. This is Levi’s book. This is a book about two people who feel lost and blank and find themselves along the way. I’m so thankful that the characters grew together but also had their own personal growth that was external to their relationship.

I love the idea of going back to go forward. To find yourself not in big moments but in little moments along the way. To realize you were enough all along. That you are perfect in your messiness. I relate to Georgie and Levi’s stories and yes, I did cry in a few parts when their pain and joy resonated so deeply with me.

I’m so grateful for this book. The romance was perfection, Levi was a wonderful grumpy cinnamon roll and Georgie was sweet and wholly herself and I love her for it. Plus, Hank and Bel? Love!

If I could give this book more than 5 stars, I would. This book deserves all of the accolades and I can’t wait for more people to read and fall in love with it, just like I did. Kate Clayborn, thank you for writing such a beautiful book.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for this ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Thank you for this advance copy of Georgie All Along, I enjoyed it so much and I can't wait for everybody to read this delight of a book.

Georgie and Levi are amazing, it is so hard not to love them. If there is something I took from this book is that our future is ours to design. This book was romantic, vulnerable and relatable.

Georgie comes back home after working her butt off as an assistant in Hollywood. When she comes back she roommates with the brother of her high school crush; enter Levi :) Georgie finds herself having to confront a life that she left behind 10 years ago. This book is hope, regret, relief, and hope again.

I really liked it.

I've sometimes struggled with Kate Clayborn's novels in the past because I think they take too long to get to what seems like a fairly obvious destination. Unfortunately, though I enjoyed the quirky cast of characters, I thought this was also true of Georgie, All Along. I don't mind a slow pace when it means opportunities for complexity or a build of chemistry or even detours from what we typically see in romance, but this novel didn't provide these things.

Now, the slow pace didn't keep this book from being enjoyable. It's good if you're looking for a low-stakes read where you know from the beginning that everything will be okay. But I didn't eagerly reach for this book as I was reading it, and I don't think it will linger in my memory for too long.

I think that the issue may be my personal reading preferences, not Clayborn's writing, but if you've struggled with the slow builds of her novels before, you will also struggle with this one.

Thank you to Kensington Books and NetGalley for an advance review copy. All opinions are my own.

I have really mixed feelings about Kate Clayborn, but I thought I would check out her latest book. The story started out slowly but picked up momentum as it went along (similar to Love Lettering). I know I read over 200 books a year, but this one was highly forgettable, and I just finished it yesterday.

The blurb (from Goodreads):
“In this heartfelt tale of one woman’s quest to reinvent herself, the acclaimed author of Love Lettering and Love at First delivers a poignant, witty reflection on how the hopes, dreams, and stories from our past shape our future . . .”
Okay this is a vast oversell. It was not heartfelt, nor was it witty and poignant. The whole “I’m going to follow the bucket list from my teenage journal to refind myself” thing was not working for me. I couldn’t identify with or relate to the main character, and I never could figure out her “deal.” The main character was never fully fleshed out, and the secondary characters were even worse.

I think this book should have been a single POV. The fact that you could read exactly what the MMC Levi thought the whole time took so much mystery and intrigue from the story and cheapened it. I will give Clayborn credit, though, as his character was the only good thing about the book - even if he also was a little tropey.

One HUGE grudge I have with this story is that the protagonist kept referring to her “fic” without ever defining or explaining it. I had to surmise from context, and I still don’t think Clayborn used it quite right.

I cannot give this a rating higher than a 2 as it wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever read, but I also wouldn’t ever recommend it to anyone. I also think it might be the last book by this author that I’ll read again.

Many thanks to Netgalley and Kensington for sharing a digital reviewer copy with me in exchange for my honest thoughts.

I received an ARC of, Georgie, All Along, by Kate Clayborn. Georgie's life is not running smoothly. Returning back home, her new roommate is her old nemeses, Levi. Can Georgie get her life back on track, and how does Levi fit in her life?

Thoroughly enjoyable, start to finish. And so incredibly kind.

Thanks to Netgalley for the advance copy.

This book was a bit out of my comfort zone, but I really enjoyed it. It was captivating and hooked me from the beginning.

I enjoyed much of this book. It was my first Kate Clayborn, and author that I've heard raves about. I was intrigued by the idea that one of the MCs was in a place in her life where she needed to figure out who she was and what she wanted. So this book was about more than just the central love story. As it turns out, both MCs have a little bit of figuring out to do. I loved that Georgie thought she wanted certain things (and a certain person) when she was young, but what she really wants most ultimately turns out to be so different. I liked Liam and I liked his backstory. My only critique is that when Georgie finally figured out who she was, it was a little less than I pictured. But this was a super sweet story and I enjoyed the romance, the characters, and the setting overall.

First of all, many thanks to NetGalley and Kensington Books for providing me with this ARC in exchange for my honest review. I am truly grateful.

When I first started reading this story, I wasn't sure if I liked it or not. It took me a while to warm up to the two main characters, especially the heroine. However, about a third of the way through, I really started enjoying it and my enjoyment just increased in leaps and bounds as the love story and each of the MCs personal growth journeys developed.

I'm actually hoping there's a sequel so we can find out what happens with Levi's brother and sister.

A scattering of F-bombs and graphic sex.

We follow Georgie as she moves back to her hometown to housesit for her parents and help her best friend who is very pregnant with her first child. She is feeling lost after losing her job and is trying to figure out her life. She finds her old high school notebook/bucket list and suddenly has a plan. The surprise was Levi Fanning walking in her door. This charming story hits so many tropes- grumpy sunshine, forced proximity, found family, and much more. The characters were unforgettable, and the plot was unique. It won't publish until January 24, 2023, but I highly recommended putting this one on your calendar. Thank you to NetGalley for the early look in return for an honest review.

I'm a big Kate Clayborn fan and thoroughly enjoyed this story about a girl starting over by returning home. The quirky characters are what really made this book for me, and the romance had a surprising amount of depth. Highly recommend!

Georgie is coming home after a glamorous career. Levi is coming home to try to repair his reputation after a series of failures. A chance meeting pushes them together and over time, they find they have more in common than they would have thought. I loved the depth of these characters. I also loved Georgie's relationship with her childhood best friend, Bel, and her husband, Evan. I loved that, in the resolution of the story, George is still empowered to be herself.

First of all I have to say thank you to NetGalley and Kensington Books for the arc 🥰 I was VERY pleasantly surprised by how much I loved this book and the connection I felt to Georgie.

Georgie goes back home to fulfill the emptiness she feels and have time to figure herself out after getting laid off from her fast paced job in California. Once she’s there, she finds something from her childhood that she thinks has the answers to it all.

The journey of self discovery Georgie has throughout this book is exactly one of the reasons I love it so much. You go along with Georgie through it all. Levi (MMC) has his own self discovery along the way as well. The go with the flow personality of Georgie is hard not to love as her decisions and needs bring us to some of my favorite scenes. I cannot pin point any time in this novel where I wanted to actually put it down. I had to force myself to actually stop and save some for later 😂

A few other reasons i loved it so much include dual POV, a grumpy/sunshine relationship, forced proximity, smallish town feel, crazy and lovable side characters and found family.

I'm a reformed small-town girl. As such, I have a love-hate relationship with small town romances. Most of the time, they're not for me. Small American towns are (in my jaded opinion) far too romanticized, especially in the romance genre. But still. Every so often, one comes around and I wish I could live there.

And surprisingly, Georgie, All Along is one of them. I think it's because Clayborn doesn't shy away from the crappy things about small towns–the exclusiveness, the way your reputation follows you no matter what. And yet she manages to get the things that matter right: the feeling of family, the "safe place" to land, so to speak.

Georgie and Levi are also great characters. I kept waiting for someone to "diagnose" them (e.g. "ahah! You have ADHD!" [or other ND label, etc]) but Clayborn resisted doing that and I LOVED it. I have a huge problem with how ND labels and other disabilities have been used lately in contemporary romance (see some of my other reviews) and I really appreciated that while some of the characters had aspects of ND and you could certainly argue one way or another for them, it wasn't A THING. I am fist pumping furiously for that.

So. Go out. Read this. Get it. Yes. All the yes.

Thanks to Netgalley and Kensington Books for the ebook ARC. All opinions are mine alone.

Disclaimer: I received the first three chapters from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The cover and title is what made me choose this book. I was hoping to read the whole story, but they just gave me an ARC with the first three chapters.

So these are my thoughts:

▪︎In general, I liked the main character, Georgie. She is funny and relatable.

▪︎I had some trouble connecting with the story, especially in the first chapter. Perhaps because there were too many descriptions and internal dialogue for my liking. I enjoyed the scene in the store where she realized she didn't have any money to pay, though.

▪︎It was also nice when she found her notebook with all her stories. But then she spent a lot of time talking about how her life used to be.

▪︎The third chapter ended without me knowing where exactly this story was heading. Maybe in the next chapters it will become clear, but it would have been great if it happened at the beginning.

Damnit, I don't know how she does it.
I know know how kate manages to write a book that feels familiar. Books that feel like the romances I gre up reading, and yet also feel completely new and different. In Georgie, All Along you will find a small town romance at its best. But instead of too many kooky characters you have an incredible and important portrayal of female friendship. You also have the full scope of complicated family relationships and how our childhood selves inform our decisions for good or ill into our adulthood.

This book felt fun and sweet but also did work like a really excellent therapy session. I walked away from this book full of joy, but also feeling maybe just a little changed. Kate has a way of making a book feel like a small town romance and also a book of poetry, just for you. I loved the experience of reading this book, just like i've loved all the rest.