Book Title: Let’s Kiss and Tell
Author: Joss Richard
Publisher: Ballantine | Dell
Publishing Date: August 2026
If there’s one thing Joss Richard has already established with It’s Different This Time, it’s that she has an extraordinary gift for creating complicated characters who contain multitudes, and then making the readers care for them. They are contradictory, frustrating, deeply vulnerable people who refuse to fit into neat archetypes, and she approaches that complexity with characteristic self-assuredness. Rather than sanding away their rough edges to make them more immediately likeable, Richard trusts readers to sit with their contradictions. It’s precisely that willingness to look complicated emotions in the eye that continues to make her voice feel so distinct within contemporary romance.
She brings that same strength to Let’s Kiss and Tell.
Richard’s sophomore novel is not like her debut
Lucy Reid is a sex columnist whose professional identity has always revolved around casual dating and sexual confidence. When she’s asked to shift her column’s focus towards relationships instead, she suddenly finds herself researching (more like feigning) emotional intimacy rather than physical chemistry. Enter Marshall Oakley, a senior news writer nursing emotional wounds of his own, who needs a fake girlfriend to accompany him to his ex’s wedding. As far as the fake-dating trope goes, this is a novel spin on it: it’s self-aware, it’s meta in its delivery with both protagonists being hyper-aware of their performance, and it is bound to break apart on grounds complicated than the usual conflicts.
That meta-awareness becomes one of the novel’s biggest strengths. Rather than simply deploying familiar romance tropes, Richard allows her characters to recognise them, question them, and actively participate in constructing them. The result is playful, never cynical. Richard also quietly — but refreshingly — inverts several familiar romantic archetypes.
Lucy occupies a role that romance has traditionally reserved for male protagonists: she is sexually experienced, emotionally independent, and entirely unapologetic about either. Marshall, meanwhile, carries the heavier emotional baggage. His struggles stem less from romance itself than from years of trying to live inside an identity other people built for him; as though his family poured him into a mould long ago, and he’s spent his adult life unable to step outside its shape. It’s an intriguing reversal of archetypes, and makes it all the more fun to learn more about these characters.
As always with Richard’s work, the real pleasure lies in spending time inside her characters’ heads. Reading Let’s Kiss and Tell feels almost luxurious. Richard lingers inside her protagonists’ interior lives with patience and generosity, allowing readers to observe not only what Lucy and Marshall do, but why they do it. Their fears, rationalisations, moments of self-awareness and moments of complete self-sabotage accumulate until they begin to feel startlingly lived-in.
She knows exactly what she wants to say, she’s just not sure if I’m the person she wants to tell it to.
That depth also allows the novel’s conversations around sex, intimacy and relationships to land with unusual nuance. Lucy’s evolving understanding of emotional vulnerability isn’t presented as a rejection of sexual freedom but as an expansion of it. The novel repeatedly asks whether intimacy can exist without emotional risk, and whether vulnerability is something we choose or something that quietly happens despite ourselves.
The fake-dating premise is a fertile ground for those questions. As rehearsed affection slowly begins to resemble genuine connection, the boundaries between performance and sincerity become increasingly difficult, for both the characters and the reader, to untangle.
While on the surface she seems like an open book, there’s a tiny thread tightly sewn around her heart that doesn’t follow any pattern. It’s a thread that if pulled will take a long time to unravel. Only someone with patience and care should have the honor to even try to pull the thread so tightly bound.
For all its warmth and humour, however, this isn’t always an easy read.
Richard invests so heavily in her characters’ emotional interiority that the inevitable third-act conflict carries genuine, heart-scratching friction. It’s painful because there are no easy villains to blame, no single catastrophic mistake that could simply be undone. Instead, the conflict grows organically from accumulated fears, old wounds, avoidance and self-protection. It captures something deeply recognisable about real relationships: sometimes people make hurtful choices not out of malice, but because they’re operating on emotional autopilot long before they realise what’s happening. Let’s Kiss and Tell is bound to be hard to love immediately.
That emotional friction may make parts of the novel uncomfortable to sit with, particularly because intimacy — in every sense of the word — remains one of the story’s central motifs. Sex, emotional closeness, trust and vulnerability are constantly intertwined, so the friction is that much more humongous.
Let’s Kiss and Tell may not offer the breeziest romance experience, but that’s never really seemed to be Richard’s ambition. Instead, she delivers another deeply character-driven novel that privileges emotional honesty over easy resolutions. It’s as if January and Gus from Emily Henry’s Beach Read decided to be vocal about their sexual life (as opposed to their writing life) while still housing old wounds.
For readers who enjoy romances that linger inside complicated interior lives, trust flawed characters to remain flawed, and aren’t afraid to let emotional messiness occupy the page, Let’s Kiss and Tell is another compelling reminder of why Joss Richard is quickly carving out a voice entirely her own.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an advance review copy (ARC). All opinions expressed are my own.