A podcast producer who no longer believes in "chemistry" and a newspaper obituarist mired in draft purgatory agree to a summer-long dare that scrambles everything they think they know about endings. Lina Mendez built her brand on happily-ever-after radio segments until her on-air fiancé dumped her between ad breaks. Ezra Park once won a city arts grant for a searing memoir excerpt and then spent three years writing its first chapter. Their one overlap? For the next three months, they share a thin-plastered wall above Sol\'s Vacuum Repair on Whitman Street in Harbor City, plus identical overdraft notices and creative block.
One humid blackout, a hallway conversation turns into a pact: Ezra will create a sunny serial about strangers finding joy, and Lina will write something that doesn\'t lean on a meet-cute at all. She\'ll drag him to Whitman Street Salsa Nights, the Lakeshore Ferris wheel at Riverlights, a wedding dress sample sale, and a community theater rehearsal where the props are held together with floral tape; he\'ll take her to the county archives, a dawn shift at the florist\'s cooler, a silent retreat in a converted lighthouse, and ride-alongs with Manny\'s Tow, retrieving abandoned getaway cars (of course). Everyone finishes a project, nobody falls in love, they swear. But between shared headphones, a busted reel-to-reel, and an old note tucked in a library hymnbook, their wavelengths keep syncing. Really.
If you like the hushed emotional weather of Nina LaCour and the city-tethered strangeness of Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, this Harbor City summer will feed your playlist; the tow-truck nights and archive mornings offer that tender, offbeat hum.
Harbor City is the secret third protagonist: a block where Sol's Vacuum Repair hums below, where salsa nights thread into stoop gossip, where the county archives smell like glue and dust, and where Manny's Tow prowls at 2 a.m. The settings are modest but specific, and the busted reel-to-reel plus a hymnbook note give the place a faint historical echo that raises the stakes just enough.
Lina's skepticism is performance as much as protection, and Ezra's inertia hides a precise, almost fussy care for language; when they share headphones, the conversation prickles with subtext. Their banter avoids quippy overload, and the way they teach each other to look, not just feel, makes their slow alignment feel earned.
Formally, this is a neat braid. Alternating chapters keep Lina and Ezra in balance while inserts of obit drafts, episode outlines, and scene notes mimic the mess of making things.
A few beats feel stretched, especially the lighthouse silence sequence and one too many return trips to the archives. Still, the final movement lands clear and unsentimental, and the prose has a clean, radio-friendly snap.
Two neighbors above Sol's Vacuum Repair dare each other into the opposite kind of story, and the summer sprints from a blackout pact to salsa nights, archive mornings, and Manny's Tow ride-alongs.
The pacing stays nimble, letting small set pieces like the ice-cold florist cooler and the creaky Riverlights Ferris wheel carry momentum without showy twists.
This book sings about endings that aren't endings at all, the way a fade-out can feel like a doorway. I kept pausing to breathe and then smiling at the audacity of making joy a craft, not a coincidence.
The obit desk and the busted reel-to-reel are perfect mirrors: one captures lives after they close, the other captures voices before they know what they want to say. That tension is electric and kind.
I love the dare because it flips the script on comfort beats. "Everyone finishes a project, nobody falls in love, they swear" becomes a challenge to listen harder, to notice the unlikely harmonies tucked inside a hallway or a hymnbook.
The scenes hum with care. The lighthouse quiet, the florist's cooler, the tow-truck dawn, the Ferris wheel at Riverlights, shared headphones on a too-thin wall—each moment is tuned to the same frequency of attention, as if the city itself is producing.
I closed the last page feeling buoyed, like a station finally comes in after static. Generous, clear-eyed, and wildly tender about creative block and the courage to start again!
