A Love Like the Sun

I just finished Riss M. Neilson’s adult debut, A Love Like the Sun, and I’m still feeling its warm glow!

Laniah and Issac have been best friends since childhood, bonded further by the loss of his parents and her father. Everything they do is shared first and foremost with the other, and they’re each other’s biggest cheerleaders and safest space through life’s ups and downs. Together with Laniah’s mom, Vanessa, the three are like family.

As adults, the affection and support is still there, but life has pulled them in different directions with Issac now in California gaining fame for his modeling and successful art videos on YouTube, and Laniah “Ni” using her business degree to help her mom run Wildly Green, a natural beauty products shop in Rhode Island. Ni is feeling their distance more these days.

When Issac finds out their shop is in danger of closing down for good, he suggests a plan to use his internet celebrity and a fake dating scenario with Ni to gain visibility for the store. The assumption is that those who love him will love her by extension and be curious to buy whatever she makes, and then they can just quietly “break up” at summer’s end. Ni is skeptical and extremely private, but Issac asks her to trust him and she does.

Issac and Ni have always been strictly platonic, treating their friendship as something almost sacred, but with this new spotlight on them, are they still just playing their parts? Ni is feeling things for Issac she’s never felt before and the way Issac looks at her now … is she just imagining it? Each new day brings a new facet to their “relationship”.

One thing Ni isn’t imagining is the health symptoms she’s experiencing. Her doctor keeps dismissing them as anxiety, but Ni knows it’s something more. She hasn’t shared this with Issac, not wanting to worry him, but when the truth comes to light, will it be more than they can endure?

I loved Issac and Ni. I loved Ni’s mom, Vanessa, shop assistant Lex, best friend Katrina (Kat), and so many others. It was an engaging friends-to-lovers story with OFF the charts chemistry between the MCs and a storyline that had unexpected depth with Ni’s chronic illness thread. It shed light on the issues women, and even more so black women, face in being underdiagnosed or misdiagnosed when facing health issues.

The themes of not wanting to ruin a lifelong friendship by chancing romance felt believable and resonated with my own experience, as did Ni’s struggle to open up about her feelings and not be so self-protective. Having an MC you can relate to makes the reading that much more special, and I truly enjoyed every minute of my read. If every woman could find herself an “Issac”, we’d all be so lucky! His unwavering dedication and support of Ni was a thing of beauty.

My one and only complaint is that the tonal shift when things got spicy was a little more 'down and dirty' than I prefer as far as the descriptiveness and dialogue goes, but it’s only a couple scenes and that’s just my personal preference - not a fault of the book.

I highly recommend this adult debut for those who enjoy a solid friends-to-lovers romance with emotional depth to it. It does have some heavier themes of grief and chronic illness, but Neilson handles them sensitively and sheds light on worthwhile issues in the process, which she can do with authority since Laniah's health scenario is inspired by her own personal experience!

★★★★ ½

Thanks to Berkley Publishing, NetGalley and author Riss M. Neilson for this digital ARC to honestly review. It's due to be published June 11, 2024.