The Grumpy Barber, the Runaway Bride, and Me at 2am

A runaway bride crashes into the worst possible town

Here’s the setup. Naomi Witt ditches her own wedding (not the one you’d assume, and I won’t spoil the why) and drives to the middle-of-nowhere Virginia town of Knockemout to bail out her identical twin sister, Tina, who is the human equivalent of a grease fire. Except Tina has already skipped town and left behind an eleven-year-old daughter, Waylay, that Naomi didn’t even know existed. Oh, and Naomi’s car and wallet are gone too. So now she’s stranded, broke, and suddenly a guardian, in a town where the local kingpin runs a barbershop-slash-bar and hates everyone.

That kingpin is Knox Morgan. He’s got a dog named Waylon, a chip on his shoulder the size of a Buick, and a policy of never letting anyone in. You can see the collision coming from orbit. That’s fine. That IS the genre. The joy isn’t the surprise, it’s the friction.

Why Knox works, and where the book absolutely does not

Let me be commercially honest for a second, because I think that’s more useful than gushing. This book sells because it nails the exact fantasy a huge chunk of readers wanted in 2022: a man who is rude to the entire planet and soft for exactly one woman and one kid. Knox is grumpy in a way that’s actually funny, not just abusive-with-abs. His running war with Waylay, the eleven-year-old who is smarter and meaner than him, is the best material in the book. Their bit where they insult each other’s intelligence over cereal did more for me than half the sex scenes.

And the spice. It’s there, it’s frequent, it’s explicit, it earns its open-door reputation. Nothing here is dubious or dark despite what the marketing haze around growly heroes might imply, so if you came for a genuine consent-gray hero, this is not that book and I’d rather tell you now. It’s dirty-talking alpha stuff played fully straight. Your mileage will depend entirely on your tolerance for a man who says “Daisy” like it’s a threat.

Now the criticism, because I promised myself I’d be real. This book is at least a hundred pages too long. There’s a suspense subplot involving Naomi’s sister and some genuinely dangerous men that keeps threatening to become the actual story and then wanders off to let Knox brood on a porch. The pacing in the back third sags hard; I found myself skimming the crime-plot beats to get back to the town. And the prose is functional at best. Score writes in short, punchy declaratives that move fast but rarely make you stop and underline anything. That’s a feature for a lot of readers. For me it’s the difference between a five and a four.

Here’s my tangent, bear with me. I read most of this on a Sunday sprawled sideways in an armchair that is objectively bad for my spine, ignoring laundry, letting my tea go cold twice. And around the two-thirds mark I put it down, annoyed, thinking “this is just fine, this is a competent romance, why is everyone unwell about it.” And then there’s a scene where Knox does something quiet and unshowy for Waylay (I’m keeping it vague on purpose) and I got genuinely misty over a fictional barber. So which is it? Is the book manipulative comfort food or did it actually land? Both. It’s both. I’ve made my peace with being an easy mark for a gruff man who’s secretly good with kids.

The secondary cast is the other quiet win. Nash, Knox’s cop brother, is clearly being set up for book two and I was already invested. Sloane, the librarian, is a firecracker. The town itself has that lived-in, everyone-knows-your-business texture that the whole small-town subgenre lives or dies on, and Score gets it right. Knockemout feels real enough that I’d know where to get a bad coffee.

The whole book is really one argument: is it braver to run, or braver to stay for the people who need you? Naomi and Knox are just two people finding out they’re worse at running than they thought.

About Lucy Score

Lucy Score wrote a stack of well-loved indie romances for years before BookTok collectively lost its mind over this one and rocketed her onto every bestseller list going. She’s a career romance author, not a literary crossover experiment, and I mean that as a compliment: she knows exactly what the reader wants and hands it over without apology. She’s prolific, she’s funny in interviews, and she writes heroes who are jerks with a soft, gooey center on a reliable schedule. If you want polished literary fiction, she is not pretending to be that. If you want to feel something on a Tuesday, she delivers every time.

If Knox ruined your standards, read these next

• The Rest of the Story by Lucy Score (the second Knockemout book, this time it’s Nash and Sloane, and honestly I liked it slightly more than book one).
• The Hating Game by Sally Thorne for enemies-to-lovers banter with tighter, sharper writing if the prose here bugged you.
• The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang if you want the grumpy-sunshine warmth with more emotional interiority.
• Icebreaker by Hannah Grace if you specifically came for the spice and the small-world coziness and want more of that exact hit.

You can grab Things We Never Got Over on Amazon here if I’ve done my job.

For your book club

1. Naomi runs from her wedding and then spends the book learning to stay. Did you find her transformation earned, or too fast?
2. Knox is rude to almost everyone. Where’s the line for you between “grumpy hero” and “actual red flag,” and does he stay on the right side of it?
3. Waylay basically steals the book. Did the romance or the makeshift-family story hit you harder, and why?
4. The crime subplot takes up real estate. Did it raise the stakes or drag the pacing for you?
5. This book became a phenomenon. What do you think it gave readers in 2022 that made it explode the way it did?