An Optimist's Guide to Heartbreak

A woman buys the little brick house on Maple Street on impulse. She lived next door to it for eight years as a child, and it once belonged to her best friend, a girl with fireflies in her eyes and music in her soul. Now she is back, pulling up floorboards and turning up lost journals, and thinking about the two siblings who grew up inside.

The friend's older brother was once everything to her, until circumstance reduced them both to memories. She takes a job at his auto shop without knowing what to expect. Her new boss, Cal Bishop, is gruff, muscular and covered in tattoos, and she is cheerful where he is guarded.

She reminds Cal of everything he wants to forget. She also carries a secret of her own, and time is short for mending what broke between them. The girl who once held them together may be the one who can do it again.

This is a contemporary romance told in the first person by the heroine. It pairs a sunny narrator with a surly, solitary hero and builds on a second-chance dynamic, with the childhood friendship and the past as the emotional core. The tone mixes warmth with grief.