- 4 days ago
- 9 min read
This review discusses significant plot developments including Aunt Lottie’s death and the ending of the novel.
Haley Pham’s Just Friends gave me two distinctly different reading experiences. I was moved by its understanding of grief as something intrusive and disorienting: a private catastrophe unfolding while everyone else continues ordering coffee, washing dishes and making plans. At the same time, I became increasingly aware of how carefully the novel rearranges Blair’s circumstances until every obstacle between her and the life she wants has been removed. The emotional ideas are sincere. The resolution is almost too obliging.
I liked what Just Friends was trying to explore, and there were passages that expressed bereavement with genuine insight. I simply wanted more resistance from the story itself: more complexity in the relationships, more consequence surrounding the characters’ choices and a little less reliance on coincidence, inheritance and withheld information to bring everything together.
Returning to the Life Blair Abandoned
Blair Lang returns to Seabrook after graduating from Pepperdine University because her beloved great-aunt Lottie is dying from terminal lung cancer. Blair has deferred a consulting position with Ernst & Young in New York, although that job represents far more than professional success. She's spent years treating financial security as a form of protection.
Her mother escaped an abusive marriage when Blair was a young child and raised her with Lottie’s support. Blair has consequently grown up believing that dependence is dangerous and that it's her responsibility to ensure her mother will never again be financially vulnerable. She abandons her dream of studying creative writing, completes a degree in economics and psychology and prepares for a career capable of funding her mother’s retirement.
Back in Seabrook, Blair goes looking for temporary work and discovers that the local coffee shop is owned by Declan Renshaw, her childhood best friend and first love. They haven't spoken in four years.
Their separation began after they received university offers on opposite sides of the country. Declan wanted Blair to follow him to Notre Dame while he pursued a potential NFL career. He believed his future income could support her writing and take care of them both. Blair heard something very different: abandon your scholarship, your education and your independence and trust a man to provide for you. Her reaction makes perfect sense.
Soon afterwards, Declan was struck by a car. His injuries ended his football career and changed the entire direction of his life. Blair never visited him because she assumed he didn't want to see her according to a message from his mother. Declan waited for her to come because he assumed she knew he needed her. Both spent the following years believing they had been rejected by the other.
That history gives the romance emotional weight, but it also establishes the novel’s preferred method of conflict: people making enormous decisions on one another’s behalf without having the conversation that might clarify anything.
Grief Is the Most Convincing Part of the Novel
The treatment of grief was easily the strongest aspect of Just Friends for me. Blair’s grief isn't confined to crying at appropriate narrative intervals. It alters her awareness of her body and surroundings. She finds herself performing ordinary tasks while feeling detached from the person completing them. She wonders how customers can calmly choose what milk they want when Lottie has died and Blair’s world has been fundamentally rearranged.
That disconnect between private devastation and public normality is painfully recognisable. Someone dies and the dishes remain dirty. Work still expects you to arrive. People who didn't love the person you lost continue speaking to you about minor inconveniences because their lives haven't divided into a before and an after.
Blair is particularly distressed by the apparent inadequacy of her final conversations with Lottie. They didn't exchange perfectly composed declarations about life, death or memory. They discussed clothing, leftovers and whether Blair would order takeaway.
Her eventual understanding that the small and seemingly ridiculous details of a life are precisely what intimacy consists of, is one of the novel’s most affecting observations.
Loving someone isn't only being present for the grand statements. It 's knowing what they wore at thirteen, what food is waiting in their fridge and which insignificant story they've already told six times.
The novel also understands that grief can make a person both desperate for connection and determined to avoid it. Blair wants someone to recognise how badly she's coping, but she resents anyone who comes close enough to see. She's frightened that Declan will understand her immediately and equally frightened that he won't.
That contradiction feels far more truthful than the idea that bereavement follows a neat emotional progression.
Declan Rebuilds His Life Through Making Things
Declan’s strongest material lies outside the romance. His father has spent years treating football success as both destiny and obligation. Declan’s identity becomes inseparable from athletic achievement, public admiration and the belief that he must reach the NFL to justify everyone’s investment in him.
The accident destroys that future. He's left with a permanent limp, extensive rehabilitation and no clear idea of who he is without football.
His eventual movement into construction and renovation is an effective counterpoint. Football is public, competitive and shaped by his father’s expectations. Building is patient, practical and chosen by Declan himself. He begins with elaborate birdhouses before progressing to homes and the coffee shop.
He's gone from chasing an inherited dream to making places in which people can live. That's a compelling transformation, although much of it happens during the years Blair is absent. By the time she returns, Declan has already built a stable and generous adult life. He owns property, supports Harper through her difficulties and appears to have processed much of his grief.
As a result, he sometimes feels less like an equally complicated protagonist and more like the safe emotional home Blair needs to become brave enough to accept. He's patient, observant and still completely devoted to her. Those qualities make him appealing, but they also make him less unpredictable than Blair.
His disability is similarly underexplored. The accident changes his body permanently, yet the narrative focuses mostly on the career it cost him. I would have welcomed more about chronic pain, altered physical confidence and the everyday experience of inhabiting a body that no longer behaves as expected.
A Romance Built on History More Than Present-Day Chemistry
The childhood-friends-to-lovers material gives Blair and Declan’s relationship an immediate emotional foundation. Their private jokes, football practices, prom arrangement, first kiss and beach date establish why neither has been able to forget the other.
The flashback interludes are useful because they allow us to experience the relationship rather than relying entirely on Blair’s memories. They also create an effective contrast between the openness of their adolescence and the guardedness of their adult reunion.
At times, however, the romance depends so heavily upon their history that the present relationship feels less developed. We know they loved each other at seventeen. We know they've continued thinking about one another. We know Declan carries Blair’s photograph in his wallet and designs every birdhouse with her in mind.
What we see less of is the adult couple discovering who the other has become outside their shared memories.
Declan has endured catastrophic injury and rebuilt his identity. Blair has completed university, formed new friendships and constructed an entire professional plan. Their reconciliation would have felt richer had the novel spent more time allowing them to be surprised by one another as adults rather than repeatedly confirming that their adolescent bond never disappeared.
The proposal after six months also arrives with the inevitable certainty of romance convention. It suits the tone and symbolism of the novel, but I wasn't entirely persuaded that the harder work of rebuilding trust had been completed.
Pham’s Writing Is Sincere but Often Overexplained
Pham is most effective when she allows ordinary physical detail to carry the emotion. Blair standing at an espresso machine after Lottie’s funeral says more about grief than another paragraph explaining how devastated she feels. The dirty dishes in the kitchen after terrible news convey the offensive normality of the world continuing.
The prose becomes less effective when Blair interprets every emotional beat for the reader. Metaphors are sometimes extended beyond their strongest point and internal commentary can repeat what the scene has already communicated.
The first-person present-tense narration keeps us close to Blair, but it also means the novel spends a great deal of time inside one person’s analysis of her own feelings.
Readers who enjoy emotionally explicit narration may find this intimate and accessible. Those who prefer more subtext may feel crowded by it.
The dialogue and imagery occasionally strain for significance, particularly when the narrative wants to ensure that a symbol or emotional parallel has been understood. I rarely felt lost about what Blair was experiencing. More restraint would have allowed several moments to land with greater force.
This is also a low-spice romance, focused on emotional history, kissing and domestic possibility rather than explicit sexual content. For readers tired of romance novels treating sexual intensity as the primary evidence of connection, that restraint may be welcome.
I found much to appreciate in Just Friends. The novel understands that grief can make everyday life feel absurd. It recognises how easily love becomes tangled with fear and how family responsibility can consume a young person’s sense of possibility. Lottie gives the story emotional substance, while the houses, journals and bird imagery create a thoughtful language of rebuilding.
The inheritance resolves Blair’s practical difficulties too easily. Declan is appealing but idealised. Gwen’s interference is forgiven without sufficient reckoning. The romance relies more upon shared childhood than the gradual discovery of adult compatibility. The prose also has a habit of explaining emotions that were already clear.
Still, I believed in Blair’s grief even when I didn't completely believe in the machinery of her happy ending.
The book’s best idea is also its simplest: loving someone doesn't mean deciding what they can bear without asking them. Real intimacy requires allowing another person to witness the unedited version of a life. The grief, the embarrassment, the failed plans and the ordinary conversation about what's left in the fridge.
That emotional truth gave Just Friends more depth than its convenient resolutions sometimes allowed.
Book Details
Just Friends — Haley Pham
Paperback ISBN
978-1398556768 — Simon & Schuster UK paperback edition published in Australia in 2026
978-1668095188 — Atria Books United States trade paperback edition published in 2026
The Australian publisher lists the paperback at 352 pages and AU$24.99.
Hardcover ISBN
N/A — no English-language hardcover edition is currently listed by Simon & Schuster or Atria Books.
The officially listed print edition is paperback rather than hardcover.
eBook ISBN
978-1398556775 — Simon & Schuster UK Australian and United Kingdom eBook edition
978-1668095195 — Atria Books United States eBook edition
Audiobook ISBN
978-1398556782 — Simon & Schuster Audio UK unabridged digital audiobook edition
978-1668156476 — Simon & Schuster Audio United States unabridged digital audiobook edition
978-1668156490 — Simon & Schuster Audio United States compact-disc edition
Genre
Contemporary Romance; New Adult Romance; Romantic Fiction
Subgenre
Second-Chance Romance; Childhood-Friends-to-Lovers Romance; Small-Town Romance; Coastal Romance; Coming-of-Adulthood Romance; Grief and Bereavement Fiction; Family Drama
Tropes / Literary Threads
Childhood best friends to lovers; first love; second-chance romance; estranged former lovers; returning to the hometown you fled; coastal small-town setting; dual timelines; past and present narratives; forced proximity; workplace proximity.
Publisher
Simon & Schuster UK — Australian and United Kingdom paperback and eBook editions
Atria Books — Simon & Schuster — original United States trade paperback and eBook editions
Simon & Schuster Audio UK — United Kingdom and international unabridged digital audiobook edition
Simon & Schuster Audio — United States digital and compact-disc audiobook editions
Series
Standalone Novel
Series Order
N/A
Just Friends is Haley Pham’s debut novel and is not currently listed as part of a series.
Formats Available
Paperback; eBook; Unabridged Digital Audiobook; Compact-Disc Audiobook
No English-language hardcover edition is currently listed by the official publishers.
Audiobook Narrator
Sura Siu
Audiobook Length
10 hours 8 minutes — unabridged digital audiobook
Original Release Date
3 March 2026 — Atria Books United States trade paperback and eBook editions
3 March 2026 — Simon & Schuster Audio United States audiobook editions
Australian Release Date
12 March 2026 — Simon & Schuster UK eBook edition available through the Australian publisher
12 March 2026 — Simon & Schuster Audio UK unabridged digital audiobook edition
17 March 2026 — Simon & Schuster UK Australian paperback edition
Page Count
352 pages — Simon & Schuster UK Australian paperback edition
352 pages — Atria Books United States trade paperback edition
320 pages — Simon & Schuster UK eBook listing
Some Australian retailers list the paperback as 320 pages, but the official Australian publisher page gives the physical edition as 352 pages. This difference is most likely caused by retailer metadata or edition-specific pagination.
Where to Buy Just Friends by Haley Pham
Affiliate Disclosure
As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. If you purchase through my Amazon affiliate links, I may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. I also encourage supporting Australian booksellers such as QBD Books and independent booksellers whenever possible.
Danielle Robinson is a literary critic and writer whose
work explores literature through the
lens of atmosphere, memory, culture, and emotional experience. Holding a double degree in philosophy and theology, she combines academic insight with a deeply refined aesthetic sensibility shaped by more than three decades working across the creative industries as an internationally published, multi-award-winning makeup artist, fashion stylist, and interior stager.
She reads widely and rigorously, reading and reviewing more than 200 books each year as both an ARC reader and commissioned critic. Through Silk & Sentences, Danielle approaches literature as something immersive and lived with — not simply stories to consume, but works that shape the way we think, feel, and move through the world.
She writes from her semi-rural Queensland home, where she lives with Alex, her husband of 33 years, their dogs Oscar and Paige, and an ever-growing library of books.
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