Summer Romance #3: Can't Get Enough by Kennedy Ryan

Get ready to feel

Welcome back to my summer romance series! This summer, I’ll be writing about the buzzy romances of the season, including a review, read-alikes for the author, and where they fit in the landscape of romance today. Last time, I wrote about Say You’ll Remember Me by Abby Jimenez and today we’re talking Can’t Get Enough by Kennedy Ryan.

The author: Ryan has been writing since 2014, going back and forth between traditional and independent publishing, and has seven (!) series to her name. Long Shot, which was released in 2018, was the first book of hers that I remember really bubbling up and made Ryan the first Black writer to win a RITA award for Best Contemporary Romance: Long. Since then, her books have been getting bigger and bigger, especially with 2022’s Before I Let Go. A romance about a divorced couple finding their way back to each other, it’s an emotional wrecking ball of a book and the first in her Skyland series. (Which is being adapted into a series on Peacock!) I think her success shows that romance readers are hungry for stories with high emotional stakes, for romance that feels grown-up, and for diverse love stories. Her characters go through it—I would recommend checking content warnings before picking up one of Ryan’s romances if you’re a sensitive reader—but their happy endings always feel spectacular.

The premise: Hendrix Barry is a striver. She’s built a highly successful business, surrounded herself with amazing friends, and is poised to break into a whole new level of success, even as she faces the challenge of caring for her mother. What she doesn’t have time for is a relationship. Until she meets and is inexorably drawn to tech mogul Maverick Bell: smart, understanding, and determined to make her feel loved and understood.

My thoughts: One of Ryan’s greatest strengths as a writer is her ability to convey emotion through her prose and this book overflows with it. Her line-level writing never feels overwrought but her characters’ emotions and connection leap off the page in vivid color and her prose flows wonderfully. Reading Can’t Get Enough felt like being swept out of my everyday life and planted into the story, a totally enveloping experience.

I was invested in and rooting for Hendrix from page one. She’s a force of nature who’s capable of pretty much anything but there’s also a part of her that craves the kind of partnership and sweeping love she’s a little reluctant to let into her life. Ryan captures that tension within Hendrix perfectly, as well as the heartbreaks both little and big of caring for her mother, who has Alzheimer’s. All of Ryan’s books that I’ve read (the Skyland series and Reel) strike a really nice balance between the central romance and the other emotional journeys her main characters are going through and this was no exception. First and foremost, it’s a love story. But it’s a love story in a world that feels real and lived-in, with characters who have things to face in every area of their lives.

Billionaire heroes aren’t usually my thing but I did wind up liking Maverick a lot for his calm, his confidence, and how deeply he appreciates and cherishes Hendrix. He’s an interesting evolution of the traditional romance alpha hero, who I think a lot of today’s authors are trying to put a new feminist spin on. Maverick sends Hendrix massive bouquets of champagne roses. He pursues her and spoils her and chooses her over and over. But he does it in a way that feels respectful of her choices and feelings, unlike some of the aggressive billionaire heroes of romances past, and Ryan uses dual POV very effectively to show the give-and-take between them.

The one thing that I’m still trying to sort out my feelings about is the circumstances of their meeting. Maverick has very recently broken up with Zere, the model and producer who Hendrix is about to go into business and has started to become friends with, and Hendrix spends a good chunk of the book holding back from a relationship with him because of how Zere would react. (Badly, as it turns out.) To be clear, I love a messy central love story but I think I wanted there to be a little more acknowledgement of the messiness and of the fact that none of the three people involved—Hendrix, Maverick, and Zere—behaved perfectly. I’m also a little predisposed towards being sympathetic to the other woman/ex-girlfriend in romance, so I could see a different reader having a totally different reaction.

My favorite love story of the entire Skyland series, however, is the friendship between its three heroines: Yasmen, Soledad, and Hendrix. The depiction of female friendship and community in all three books is so beautiful and heartfelt. These women show up for and support each other through the worst moments of their lives. They tease each other and cheer for each other and love each other fiercely. One of my favorite quotes from the entire series comes from This Could Be Us: “There aren’t enough sonnets for friendship. Not enough songs for the kind of love not born of blood or body but of time and care. They are the ones we choose to laugh and cry and live with. When lovers come and go, friends are the ones who remain. We are each other’s constants.” With this series and these characters, Ryan’s written her own song of friendship and I’d highly recommend it if you’re looking for a powerful love story that feels very grown-up.

Read-alikes:

• If you want another author who writes wonderfully about emotions: Ever After Always by Chloe Liese, a marriage in crisis romance with two richly drawn main characters and a depiction of a deeply loving, supportive family at its center.

• If you want a high-stakes, steamy love story: Hate to Want You by Alisha Rai, about two formerly close families now enmeshed in a feud and two former high school sweethearts who secretly meet up once a year for a night of no-strings passion. (I think the whole Forbidden Hearts series could be a great Ryan read-alike!)

• If you want a fresh take on the billionaire hero: Trade Me by Courtney Milan, about struggling college student Tina and heir to a tech fortune Blake who agree to trade lives for three months after Tina tells Blake he couldn’t handle her life.

• If you want a heroine rediscovering herself and a messy central love story: The Art of Scandal by Regina Black, about the wife of a cheating politician who agrees to keep up appearances until after the election but finds herself plunging into a romance with a talented and troubled younger man.

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Currently reading: Jane Austen’s Bookshelf by Rebecca Romney, a dive into the now-forgotten female writers who inspired Austen, and When I Think of You by Myah Ariel, which I’ve just started but might be a great read-alike for fans of Ryan’s Reel.

Recommendations, miscellany, and little bits of joy:

• The newly renovated Met wing dedicated to the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Ancient Americas. We went last weekend and it’s fantastic, full of amazing pieces of art and interesting historical context.

• The return of Love Island, my favorite summer guilty pleasure.

• The striking, stripped-back Sunset Boulevard revival currently running on Broadway. I don’t think it’s perfect—the production relies on a truly insane amount of fog—but I desperately want to discuss and dissect it. (And see it again?)