Title: All Alone with You
Author: Amelia Diane Coombs
Genre: Young Adult Contemporary Romance
ISBN: 978-1534493575
Publisher: Simon Schuster Books for Young Readers
Published: 2023
Publisher’s Description: HBO Max’s Hacks gets a romantic twist in the vein of Jenn Bennett in this swoon-worthy novel about a standoffish teen girl whose loner status gets challenged by a dynamic elderly woman and a perpetually cheerful boy.
Eloise Deane is the worst and doesn’t care who knows it. She’s grumpy, prefers to be alone, and is just slogging through senior year with one goal: get accepted to USC and move to California. So when her guidance counselor drops the bombshell that to score a scholarship she’ll desperately need, her applications require volunteer hours, Eloise is up for the challenge. Until she’s paired with LifeCare, a volunteer agency that offers social support to lonely seniors through phone calls and visits. Basically, it’s a total nightmare for Eloise’s anxiety.
Eloise realizes she’s made a huge mistake—especially when she’s paired with Austin, the fellow volunteer who’s the sunshine to her cloudy day. But as Eloise and Austin work together to keep Marianne Landis—the mysterious former frontwoman of the 1970s band the Laundromats—company, something strange happens. She actually…likes Marianne and Austin? Eloise isn’t sure what to do with that, especially when her feelings toward Austin begin to blur into more-than-friends territory.
And when ex-girlfriends, long-buried wounds, and insecurities reappear, Eloise will have a choice to make: go all in with Marianne and Austin or get out before she gets hurt.
Literary Atelier Review: I love books about music and musicians. Plus I love Jenn Bennett so when this lovely contemporary young adult romance novel by Amelia Diane Coombs was compared to Jenn Bennett I simply had to pick it up. I was not disappointed at all.
All Alone with You is a really wonderful grumpy-sunshine tale of love between anxious Eloise and happy-go-lucky Austin who are thrown together at work to take care of Stevie Nicks-esque octogenarian Marianne Landis, who has her own ghosts of love lost.
If you love cinnamon roll, puppy-dog adorable heroes in romance then this book is for you because Austin is so loveable, his only flaw is that he sadly does not exist in real life. Meanwhile Eloise’s pained internal dialogue helps the reader to understand some of her more terrible decisions and humanise her all the while keeping her so realistic in her struggles with anxiety and self isolation.
This was my first book by Amelia Diane Coombs and I loved it so much that I went on to hunt out her other novels and work my way through her entire backlist. You definitely should too.