FLIP-FLOPS & Felonies

Wren Calloway is very good at managing other people’s events. She can run a 600-person gala without a single visible seam, charm a vendor back from the brink, and keep her face perfectly neutral when a client changes the florals forty-eight hours out. She arrived in Pelican Cove, North Carolina for a quiet summer sabbatical with a plan: sit on her late grandmother’s porch, figure out what she actually wants, and return to Chicago in September with clarity. She has a color-coded sabbatical itinerary. She has six linen blazers. She has not accounted for the HOA presidency bequeathed to her in the will, or for the man next door who plays guitar on his porch until 10:12pm every Friday night — eleven minutes past the ordinance, consistently, apparently on principle.

She files a violation notice. It has three subsection references and a hand-drawn diagram.

He responds with one sentence. The sentence is technically correct.

Before the documentation war can reach any kind of resolution, there’s the festival committee that assigns them both to co-chair the Fourth of July fireworks show with four weeks and zero input from either of them, a planning binder with a contingency section he refuses to admit is better than his legal pad, an afternoon on the supply run where she reads twelve pages of manifest aloud in his truck and he asks two good questions and she thinks about September for the first time and doesn’t want to, a grandmother’s letters that surface one by one and reveal that Lou saw all of this coming and planned accordingly, and a quiet evening on the shack’s porch where he plays something he’s never played for an audience and she forgets, for the first time all summer, to file anything.

She’s spent years making herself efficient and useful and easy to manage, saying yes to the job and the city and the carefully organized life, because wanting something specific enough to risk it has always felt like more than she knew how to carry. He rebuilt his entire world at twenty-nine from a deteriorated kiosk and a recipe card from someone named Pearl, and has been quietly, stubbornly happy ever since — and the only thing that makes him less than completely at ease is the growing certainty that this summer is going to end and take something with it.

Light romantic comedy with a North Carolina coast summer, a grandmother who planned everything from beyond the grave, and a man who says eleven words when he means a hundred. The kind of book you read in one sitting on a porch with something cold and then immediately want to lend to someone.

WHY THIS WILL SELL

→ Romance > Romantic Comedy sits at 8.7 sales-to-comp (Hot Mainstream) with ~120 estimated daily sales per top-20 title — enemies-to-lovers + grumpy/sunshine is the #1 performing trope combination in the February 2026 K-lytics Top 100

→ Dual-category play with Romance > Small Town & Rural (6.4 sales-to-comp, Hot Niche) adds a second high-volume category with a loyal, series-hungry readership

→ Summer and beach settings are an open lane — Christmas dominates seasonal rom-com; no current Top 100 title owns the July 4th beach town niche

→ The HOA documentation war is a fresh comedic differentiator — no current Top 100 title uses a bureaucratic paper trail as its central comic engine; this is a BookTok hook that writes itself

→ May/June launch captures peak seasonal discovery — “beach read romance,” “summer romance books,” and “Fourth of July romance” searches spike June–August; this book is built for that window

→ Series architecture in place — three Pelican Cove books with ensemble characters seeded in Book 1; small town rom-com series show 65–70% readthrough from Book 1 to Book 2

TROPES:
• Enemies-to-Lovers
• Small Town
• Grumpy/Sunshine
• Forced Cooperation
• Slow Burn
• Forced Proximity
• Found Community
• Dead Grandmother Who Planned Everything
• Letters From the Past

HEAT LEVEL: Moderate / Closed Door

Perfect for fans of: Laurie Gilmore, Christina Lauren, Amy Daws, and Erin Hahn