Editors Reads Verdict
Things We Never Got Over is the Knockemout series opener that made Lucy Score a bestseller, combining a found-family premise with small-town romance and a grumpy hero of considerable depth. The child character Waylay is one of the genre's most winning secondary characters in years.
What We Loved
- Waylay is an extraordinary child character — sharp, guarded, and genuinely affecting
- Knox's gruffness is credibly motivated and credibly softened over the course of the novel
- The small-town ensemble is colorful without being cartoonish
- The found-family element adds emotional stakes the romance alone couldn't provide
Minor Drawbacks
- The plot around Naomi's twin sister is somewhat underdeveloped
- At nearly 500 pages, some sections run long
- The conflict resolution could use more complexity
Key Takeaways
- → Found family — chosen and assembled from necessity — can exceed biological family in functional warmth
- → Children who have been failed by adults develop a specific radar for trustworthiness that is usually accurate
- → Leaving a life that no longer fits is terrifying and necessary in equal measure
- → Gruffness is often the exterior presentation of someone who has been hurt enough to stop advertising softness
- → Small-town community has genuine protective value alongside its suffocating social pressure
| Author | Lucy Score |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Sourcebooks Casablanca |
| Pages | 487 |
| Published | January 18, 2022 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Romance, Contemporary Fiction |
| Difficulty | Beginner |
| Best For | Romance readers who want emotional weight from a found-family subplot; fans of grumpy-sunshine dynamics; small-town romance enthusiasts. |
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.
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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