Review: "Under the Northern Lights" by Lindsey Brookes

Under the Northern Lights by Lindsey Brookes
Published August 2025 via Harpeth Road Press
★★★

Sometimes an opportunity presents itself, and you just have to take it. For Aurora in Under the Northern Lights, that's a trip to Alaska...and then a detour off the beaten path to visit a fishing retreat. For me, though, it was that I saw several "northern lights" books in short succession...and decided that I had to read them all. This is the first, with two or three yet to come.

This makes for what I think of as a bread-and-butter romance—straightforward, not super complex, a quick read that doesn't require too much brainpower. (Not a criticism...we all need some cotton candy for the brain sometimes!) It's a little saccharine for my tastes (uses of the word "sweet": 18), with hero and heroine both immediately falling for each other and unhesitatingly opening up about sore spots in their lives, but I appreciated that the primary conflict was external, with both characters interested but knowing that geographical distance is a real and practical impediment. There are a lot of elements that romance readers will be familiar with (loving/meddling family that is way too vocal with their opinions; heroine whose primary flaw is that she's clumsy...actually, not even clumsy, she just trips a couple of times), but the setting is used to a satisfying degree.

There's room left in the book for other characters to have romances in future books—something with intentional series potential, I think! If there are further books, I'd like to see the characters work a bit harder to pass the Bechdel test; they technically do here, but as far as I'm concerned, if something passes the Bechdel test on a technicality then it hasn't actually passed. But it's always nice to see romance in which it's all basically good people who are doing their best to figure it out, including doing their best to communicate. A nice quick read for a summer afternoon.

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