THE GREAT PUMPKIN RIVALRY

Hattie Duff has spent six years building the best pumpkin operation in Marlow County — the right seed stock, the right soil, the right growing schedule — and three years finishing second at the county weigh-off because of Graham Varga. Always second. Always by less than a pound. She has been very polite about it.

Then a September storm takes his greenhouse. Six weeks before the weigh-off.

She offers him hers. Because she is who she is, and winning because his greenhouse failed is not winning, and she knows this even when she wishes she didn’t.

Before Hattie can simply tend her pumpkin and wait for October, there’s the schedule they negotiate at 6 a.m. and neither of them keeps, a bracket he replaces on her greenhouse support without being asked and without leaving a note about it, cards accumulating on the work table where they leave each other moisture readings and dry two-line observations that are technically about pumpkins and increasingly are not, a frost warning that brings them both to the greenhouse at 2 a.m. with no sleep left to maintain their architecture, and the quiet conversation that follows — where she tells him something about her family she usually doesn’t and he tells her something about why he left Chicago that he hasn’t told anyone in three years.

She’s spent her whole life being the warm person in the room, accommodating every need but her own, wanting things in private because wanting them out loud felt riskier than not having them. He came to Marlow County to be small and uncomplicated, to tend something that was only his, because the last time he cared carefully about something that mattered, people got hurt anyway.

Small-town harvest romance with cold mornings, warm greenhouses, and a competition that was never really about the pumpkins. The kind of book you read under a blanket in October and immediately want to press into someone’s hands.

WHY THIS WILL SELL

→ Romance > Holiday > Seasonal sits at 6.1 sales-to-comp (Hot Mainstream) with 55–90 estimated daily sales per top 20 title — and the fall/harvest window runs 12 commercially active weeks (late August through mid-November), with 60% less title competition than Christmas

→ Triple-category play (Seasonal + Small Town + Clean & Wholesome) positions this book to draw from three distinct reader pools simultaneously — a structural advantage most sweet romances don’t exploit

→ Rivals to lovers + forced proximity with no direct agricultural comp — there is no crowding title doing this exact premise; the giant pumpkin setting gives the book a distinctive visual identity that travels on BookTok

→ Grumpy/sunshine with a six-week countdown timeline creates urgency that mirrors the reader’s own seasonal calendar — the weigh-off is in October; so is the reader

→ Evergreen past Halloween — the harvest/small-town setting is not Halloween-coded; promote through mid-November without seasonal drop-off

TROPES:
• Rivals to Lovers
• Forced Proximity
• Grumpy/Sunshine
• Small-Town Harvest
• Slow Burn
• Shared Space
• Competition
• Competent Heroine
• Men Who Show Up

HEAT LEVEL: Sweet / Closed Door — no explicit content; the tension is entirely in the almost; all intimacy beats are flagged for escalation if desired

Perfect for fans of: Jenny Colgan, Sally Thorne, Susan Mallery