Bad Words

 In a battle of words, who would win: an author or a critic? One thing this book drives home is this: words matter.

Parker Navarro is on the cusp of launching his highly buzzed debut novel These Extraordinary Times to the world when Selina Chan, a critic from City Magazine takes aim at it with a scathingly honest review that catches fire on social media and dooms the book before it can even find an audience.

Now, two years later, humbled Parker is ready to try again with his second novel High and Dry, hoping his luck is better this time around. Unfortunately, City Magazine’s editor, desperate for “clicks’ and smelling blood in the water, jumps at the chance to assign Selina to review it. Let’s just say it’s NOT good news for Parker.

When these two encounter each other in person at an event, all kinds of sparks fly, but not in the good way, and when footage of it is posted online, everyone seems to have an opinion.

So is Selina the villain of this story and Parker her innocent victim? If you ask patrons of the internet in this book, you’ll get a very divided answer! It begs all sorts of questions for both authors, critics and their audience:

Is unflinching honesty always the best policy?

Does the impact on someone’s career matter?

Does thoughtful criticism have a healthy role in publishing and other media fields?

Should we try to understand someone’s intent before judging how they present it?

Does being a BIPOC author require you to represent that group in the most positive light?

These were just some of the questions this book raised for me, and it certainly made me more aware of the impact my own words can have if not exercised thoughtfully.

To be clear, though, this book isn’t some heady thinkpiece about authors and critics. At the end, it’s still a romance - just one with a little more meat on its bones, so to speak. 

Parker and Selina have to find their way through their differences, but in doing so they also discover how much they have in common, like their mutually dysfunctional families and the unique pressures of their Asian heritage. The journey is messy, emotional, and sometimes hurtful, but isn’t that a human relationship in a nutshell? 

This was an immersion read with my Kindle copy and the ALC narrated by Katharine Chin and Major Curda, who brought Selina and Parker to life beautifully. Side characters like Parker’s roommate Arthur, and Selina’s friends Jacob and Cassie were wonderful additions as well!

If you want a contemporary romance with literary fiction leanings, this is an excellent adult fiction debut from Rioghnach Robinson. It does have one spicy scene, but nothing you can’t skip past if you don’t prefer those. My one nitpick on the audio is that there are a lot of email exchanges in some chapters and the narrator had to read off the three-line headers for EVERY exchange which got tedious. I switched to my Kindle only for those chapters. 

Overall, I highly recommend either format - or both, and Rioghnach Robinson is definitely an author whose future work I’ll be watching for!

★★★★ ½ 

Thanks to St. Martin’s Press, NetGalley and author Rioghnach Robinson for the digital ARC and Macmillan Audio for the ALC to honestly review. The book is out on October 6, 2026.