Review: "I Will Always Love You (Maybe)" by Dana Hawkins

I Will Always Love You (Maybe) by Dana Hawkins
Published February 2026 via Storm Publishing
★★★★

Meet Cute in Minnesota is back, this time with an unexpected pairing! Colby has isolated herself since losing her wife six years ago—her golden retriever is all the company she wants or needs. And Josie loves her work as a vet tech, but in every other part of her life she's restless. They don't have a meet-cute so much as a meet-stress...but then Josie offers to help Colby out with Kona, and it just so happens that a storm sweeps in. And suddenly they have all the time in the world to get to know each other.

Lesbian romance has come, my gosh, so far since I was a semi-closeted teenager trawling through Fun Home to make lists of every book mentioned and try (and mostly fail) to find them at the library. Romance in general can be quite hit-or-miss—like any genre, of course, but there's so much romance out there, and...everyone has their own tastes. (Incidentally, I once upon a time aced a job interview in which I used my dislike of alpha heroes to illustrate how I was comfortable working on things that I was not personally interested in. But I digress—that's another, more heterosexual story.)

I haven't read the first of this series yet (just the second and now third), but this has confirmed for me that book 2 was no one-off. Hawkins does such a wonderful job of subverting romance tropes. Is this a forced-proximity romance...sure. Am I sick of every romance novel and its mother being defined by its tropes, yes yes. But there's remarkably little tension of the negative sort: no sniping and getting in each other's way and misunderstanding each other. Instead we have two characters who sometimes clash...and then they talk about it, and they figure it out. They hook up, and they both have misgivings (for different reasons), and there's an awkward moment and then they talk it through. Even the secret Colby is hiding pans out in an unexpected way: It's clear that at some point that secret will come out, but it's less clear what shape that will take, or how much control Colby will have over how it comes out. It's clear fairly early on what the most dramatic option would be, but Hawkins neatly sidesteps that and goes for something more subtle (if still with its own fair share of heartbreak).

Not sure if this series will continue, but I'll happily keep reading if it does.

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