Morton creates two incredible characters more through the way they view each other than how they view themselves, and I probably laughed as much as they made each other do the same. The snark in this book is real but never feels forced or inauthentic. Morton weaves enough hints about the dark moment into the narrative to have it not be a complete surprise, but the final conflict takes an unexpected turn that makes the resolution that much more fulfilling. Laurie might be the one to pursue spending time with Mags (for his own undisclosed reasons), but Mags allows himself to be drawn into Laurie’s orbit and finds the human connection he’d previously limited to more constrained friendships and hookups. This novel isn’t an “opposites attract” story so much as it is the tale of two people who discover far too late that love has crept up on them while they were busy being generally bemused by their burgeoning friendship. But though Laurie and Mags are of a similar age, which gives them delightful shared tastes to bond over, the characters are still vastly different. I enjoy age-gap romances because it’s one of the easiest ways to bring two vastly different characters together.

(Luckily, Morton features a lovely epilogue for these characters on her website, allowing me a delightful final taste of their lives.) Mags and Laurie wormed their way into my heart much as they did for each other, and I wasn’t quite ready to be finished with them after the last page. I knew that, as usual, her storytelling would leave me with the sort of book hangover that is difficult to shake. Morton excels at packing humor and emotion into a vibrant, immersive story that you can’t help but read straight through to the end.

Beautifully Unexpected by Lily Morton