Things We Never Got Over

The Town She Didn’t Plan to Stay In

Naomi Witt drives to Knockemout, Virginia, to rescue her twin sister Tina — who has, as usual, made poor decisions at significant cost to others — and arrives to find that Tina has already left, taking Naomi’s car, her money, and her phone. What Tina has left behind is Waylay, her daughter, whom Naomi has never met but who turns out to be precisely the kind of child who makes you want to reorganize your life.

Knox Morgan is Knockemout’s most formidable resident: taciturn, competent, deeply disinclined to involve himself in other people’s problems. He involves himself in Naomi’s problem almost immediately, which is how Things We Never Got Over works: not through the central pair wanting to fall in love, but through the situational requirements of an eight-year-old who needs both of them.

Waylay

The most discussed element of Lucy Score’s novel — and the most deserving of discussion — is Waylay Morgan. Eight years old, raised by a mother who treated her as inconvenience and occasionally as currency, she has developed the particular competence of a child who has learned to rely only on herself: sharp, self-protective, capable, and suspicious of warmth because warmth has previously been a prelude to disappointment.

Watching Waylay gradually decide that Naomi and Knox are people she can trust is the novel’s most emotionally resonant thread, and Score earns every step of it. The child is neither precociously wise nor helplessly damaged but specifically, recognizably a person.

Knox and the Grumpy Hero

Knox Morgan is a well-constructed example of the grumpy hero type: his specific reasons for distance and guardedness emerge gradually and turn out to be entirely coherent with the character we see on the page. The transition from hostility to reluctant aid to genuine investment in Naomi and Waylay is handled with care.

Small-Town Done Right

Knockemout has the texture of a real community — various, specific, populated by people with their own histories and opinions — rather than the generic cozy-small-town of the subgenre at its laziest.

Naomi and the Life She Outgrows

If Waylay is the novel’s heart and Knox its smolder, Naomi Witt is its quiet engine of change. A responsible, people-pleasing woman who has spent her life cleaning up after her chaotic twin and, on the day the book opens, has literally just fled her own wedding, Naomi arrives in Knockemout at a moment of total upheaval — stripped of her car, her money, and her plan. Lucy Score uses this premise to give her heroine a genuine arc beyond the romance: Naomi must decide whether to keep living the cautious, accommodating life that has left her stranded and unfulfilled, or to claim something messier and more her own. Choosing to stay for Waylay becomes the first truly selfish-in-the-healthy-sense decision she has ever made, and watching a perpetual caretaker finally let herself be cared for gives the book emotional ballast. She is not merely a love interest; she is a woman learning, late, to want things for herself.

Grumpy-Sunshine, Executed With Care

Things We Never Got Over is a near-perfect specimen of the “grumpy-sunshine” dynamic that dominates contemporary romance, and its success on BookTok — it made Lucy Score a runaway bestseller and launched the beloved Knockemout series — owes much to how well it executes the trope. Knox’s gruffness is never just a costume: Score gives it coherent roots in old wounds, and his slow thaw from hostility to reluctant helper to fiercely devoted partner feels earned rather than switched on. Naomi’s warmth is not naïveté but resilience. The friction between them generates real banter and real heat, and the slow burn is paced to keep readers turning pages well past their bedtime. It is comfort-read romance done at a high level of craft, which is exactly why it became a phenomenon.

A Few Honest Caveats

No book this popular is without its rough edges, and a fair review should name them. At nearly 500 pages, Things We Never Got Over runs long, and some stretches — particularly the subplot involving Naomi’s destructive twin sister Tina, whose schemes hover at the story’s margins — feel underdeveloped relative to the care lavished on the central trio. The looming external conflict that drives the back half can feel like genre obligation rather than organic stakes, and its resolution is tidier than the emotional buildup warrants. None of this is fatal; these are the familiar trade-offs of a generous, crowd-pleasing romance that prioritizes warmth and momentum over airtight plotting. Readers who come for the grumpy-sunshine chemistry and the found-family glow — which is to say most of its enormous audience — will happily forgive the slack, but it is worth knowing the book is a touch baggier than its tightest competitors.

The Found-Family Engine

What elevates the book above a straightforward love story is its found-family core. The romance does not progress because two people decide they want each other; it progresses because an eight-year-old needs both of them, and in showing up for Waylay, Naomi and Knox accidentally build the family none of them planned. Score understands that chosen family, assembled from necessity and sustained by deliberate care, can carry more emotional weight than the biological bonds that failed these characters, and she makes that theme the book’s true subject. The result is a romance with stakes beyond whether the couple ends up together — because a child’s security depends on it — and that added dimension is what gives the novel its lingering warmth and its broad appeal.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — A warmly realized small-town romance elevated by one of the genre’s best child characters and a found-family emotional engine that gives the romance genuine weight.

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