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Annabel Monaghan takes the Pretty Woman blueprint and quietly reroutes it into something warmer in Dolly All the Time, a fake-dating contemporary romance about a single mom who has spent her whole life being the responsible one and the awkward scion who finally makes her want to lean on someone. The pleasure here is watching attraction accumulate in small gestures rather than fireworks.
The Review
Dolly Brick is the kind of heroine romance doesn't write often enough: thirty-nine, never married, a mother, and the person her whole family quietly depends on. She comes back to her seaside Rhode Island hometown for the summer to keep her dad and brother from losing the house, and Monaghan never lets us forget how much that costs her. When Dolly stops to help Stewart Whitfield change a tire mid-public-breakup, the fake-dating arrangement that follows isn't a cute meet-cute so much as one more problem Dolly decides she can fix. That framing gives the whole book its emotional spine. The romance question isn't will they kiss. It's whether a woman who's spent decades refusing to need anyone can let herself be cared for.
The chemistry builds the slow way, which I loved. Public dinners and high-society benefits give way to boat rides and unhurried conversations, and Monaghan is patient enough to let attraction accrue in small gestures rather than declarations. Stewart is the wealthy workaholic on paper, but he's written as endearingly clumsy at romance, which softens the billionaire-fantasy edges considerably. The heat reads as warm and dizzy rather than explicit — the description's ghost-pepper kiss line is about as graphic as the cues get — so the payoff is more about emotional surrender than physical escalation. The two finally meeting in the middle feels earned because we've watched Dolly resist it for so long.
Monaghan's real gift, as fans of Nora Goes Off Script already know, is dialogue and texture. The banter has genuine wit, and the family dynamics feel lived-in rather than decorative. There's a younger sister, a disabled brother, a dad, and Dolly holds them all together without the book turning her into a saint. The book is funny in a low-key, observational way that keeps the duty-versus-desire theme from turning heavy. It's a breezy summer read on the surface with more underneath it. The tension between loyalty to the people who depend on you and the right to want something for yourself is treated seriously, even within a fairytale shape.
Now the honest part. A significant obstacle gets raised around the midpoint and then resolved a little too neatly at the end, fast enough that several readers felt it didn't hold up against how serious the setup felt. It's a real flaw, not just a quibble, and if you want the final crisis to carry plausible weight you'll feel the book skating past it.
For anyone weighing whether Dolly belongs on the summer pile: this is contemporary romance for readers who want their tropes handled with care and their heroines grown-up. It's a fairytale-flavored, fake-to-real story that runs more tender than steamy. If you like later-in-life leads, quiet love stories that develop without manufactured drama, and a single-mom protagonist who actually feels like one, Monaghan has written something genuinely satisfying here.
Reviewed by Sloane
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