Review: "Meet Me Under the Northern Lights" by Mandy Baggot

Meet Me Under the Northern Lights by Mandy Baggot
Published September 2025 via Boldwood Books
★★★

Chloe never thought falsely bolstering her CV with a command of Icelandic would come back to bite her—but come back to bite her it does when she is sent on a last-minute trip to (you guessed it) Iceland to do research for a client pitch. Naturally, romantic shenanigans ensue.

This is one where I saw an opportunity and I took it: I saw several "northern lights" books in short succession and decided that the only natural thing to do was read all of them and pretend I have a northern lights view in the sky. This is the second of those four books (I'm waiting on a library copy for the third, and the fourth doesn't publish until November).

What worked well for me here: Partly because Chloe is doing prep work for what amounts to a guided trip, she has a chance to do a lot of Iceland-specific things. She doesn't try hákarl, but that's probably just as well (neither Chloe nor I would handle that particularly well), and she's pretty game about all of the things she does try. Her backstory also has some interest—I would have preferred a few more specifics about her condition (I spent much of the book mildly concerned that it would end with a "surprise! This is fixed! The doctors were wrong!"), but the general details are something that I haven't seen a ton of in romance, so that was nice. And, of course, the emphasis on found families is great.

What didn't work so well for me: I didn't really believe the romance. Gunnar gives Chloe a pet name the first time they meet, and it translates—she looks this up early on—to "my sweetie," which, given the time frame, reads as more creepy than anything to me. Why not call her something a bit funnier that would feel cute/romantic later in the book? "Little elf" or something else that might tie into the Icelandic setting. He's also withholding some pretty big information from her for most of the book, and at some point I have to think his ex is right; it's not about the information itself but that he feels the need to hide it. In general, though, I'm not really a fan of withheld information as a conflict point, and here we have both Gunnar's family situation and Chloe's work situation to contend with. (The work situation just makes me a bit sad—a boss who sends you on a last, last-minute trip and can't be bothered to help out with what she knows will be a tricky hotel situation is not one you should be bending over backward to please...to say nothing of a boss who calls you in for a surprise, zero-warning, high-stakes video meeting with external clients. It's a romance novel, so everything eventually works out in Chloe's favor, but I ended up finding the way it works out even less believable than the romance.)

So overall: Fun but not the best fit for me as a reader—but then, I was just in it for Iceland! I expect this one will find its readers.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.