Review: "Every Step She Takes" by Alison Cochrun

Every Step She Takes by Alison Cochrun
Published September 2025 via Atria
★★★

Sadie could use a shakeup in her life—and that comes in the form of a surprise trip to complete a pilgrimage across Portugal and Spain and in the process help out her sister. Meanwhile, Mal has been shaking up her own life over and over again since coming out to her father backfired...and now, with his funeral looming, she's taking a break to walk one of the Portuguese routes of the Camino de Santiago. What they don't anticipate when airplane turbulence inspires Sadie to shriek out all her secrets and insecurities: they're on the same tour. What they also don't anticipate: chemistry. But whether either of them is ready for a relationship, well...

What worked well for me:
- There isn't enough Camino fiction out there, and a lesbian romance? Yes please.

- This takes place on the Portuguese route, too; the Camino Francés (which runs across northern Spain) is the most popular route by far, with the Camino Portugues (which runs north through Portugal and Spain) a distant second, and the Francés is much much more common in both fiction and memoir. (I walked both, back to back, but—if it's not confusing enough already—a different variant of the Portugues route.)

- Sadie is unapologetically fat, and although she has some related insecurities, for the purposes of the Camino her weight is treated as a nonevent.

- I liked the tour group more than I expected to (Stefano is a little over the top, but Rebecca is an unexpected gem).

- I liked Sadie's doom-spiral on the plane (as someone without flight anxiety but with travel anxiety...relatable).

- There's room left at the end for a possible sequel (perhaps on a different route?), which I'd be all in favor of.

- This shouldn't be relevant by the time the book is published, but I read an ARC that hadn't been through proofreading yet, and some of the small errors (which are, again, normal for this point in the process) were choice. We have an aircraft maker named "Boing" and a tibia located in a character's forearm—I'm here for it. (Yes, this point is in the correct list. One of the oddities of my nerdery is that I have favorite typos.)

What didn't work so well for me:
- Too many brand names (often 10+ per chapter) and cultural references. I get why authors include them (especially for more recognizable brands, they convey info quickly and add some detail), but too many brand names always reads to me as...well, kind of lazy, and something that will quickly date the book.

- Neither Sadie nor Mal really did it for me as a heroine, and together I wasn't convinced of their chemistry. Their introduction (though not the reader's introduction to Sadie) involves Sadie drunk and crying and yelling on a plane, and even if Mal finds that cute, the cringe feeling followed me for the rest of the book. This might just be me—"messy" heroines have never really been my thing. Mal could be a balancing point, but the deeper we get into the book the more Mal's veneer of having-it-togetherness cracks and the messier she gets too. That has its positives, of course (keeps her more complicated), but it also made me wonder about the stability of a relationship between two people who are individually on such unsteady ground. (And—not to be shallow—but it killed the cool-girl appeal! Fine in real life, but sometimes in romance you just want your unapproachable cool girl to be approachable after all...but still mysteriously cool.)

- (Minor spoiler in this BP) I would have preferred a setup other than faking dating. Other than being a bit trope-y, the way Sadie and Mal eventually end up in bed together (spoiler: one character begs another) sat badly with me. That should have been a point for one of them to say "whoa, we're getting in too deep" or "hey, this is getting too complicated for me", not to demur for three seconds and then go ahead.

So where does that leave me? I came out of this with some significant reservations but am still pretty thrilled that it exists. I probably won't return to this one, but if there is a follow-up book set on the Camino or another path in the future, I'll happily read it.

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