Score by Kennedy Ryan Book Review — A Second Chance Romance That Will Crack Your Heart Wide Open
- Joao Nsita
- 3 hours ago
- 9 min read
Score by Kennedy Ryan Review — A Second Chance Romance That Will Crack Your Heart Wide Open
There are romance novelists who entertain you. And then there are romance novelists who transform you — the ones who hand you back a piece of yourself you didn't know you'd lost somewhere along the way. Kennedy Ryan is in that second category, and Score, her long-awaited second book in the Hollywood Renaissance series, is everything readers have been hoping for and a few things they didn't dare ask for.
This is the book that made me ugly cry on a Thursday. I want you to know that going in.
Score is the story of Verity Hill — award-winning screenwriter, razor-sharp professional, woman in full command of her career — and Wright "Monk" Bellamy, the musician who was her college love and whose heart she left broken a decade ago. When they're brought together to collaborate on a Harlem Renaissance biopic, neither of them is remotely prepared for what happens next. They have to write together. Work together. Be in rooms together. Day after day, with all that history sitting quietly between them like an undetonated bomb.
Kennedy Ryan writes love stories the way a surgeon works — precise, intentional, and with the kind of care that suggests she knows exactly what she's doing with your heart and has decided to proceed anyway. Score is, without question, one of the best books of 2026 so far. It is emotionally brave, culturally rich, beautifully written, and the kind of love story that stays with you long after you've closed the last page.
I came in a fan. I left completely undone.
Book Details
Title: Score
Author: Kennedy Ryan
Genre: Contemporary Romance / Second Chance Romance
Publication Date: May 19, 2026
Series: Hollywood Renaissance, Book 2
Amazon: Buy Score on Amazon
Author Website: kennedyryanwrites.com
What This Book Is About
Verity Hill is not the kind of woman who looks back. She is forward-facing, career-driven, and deeply skilled at the particular art of not thinking too hard about the things she has loved and left. She built a career in Hollywood that most people only dream of, and she has spent the last ten years very deliberately not wondering whether what she did to Monk Bellamy was the right choice.
And then the industry throws them together on the same project, and all of that carefully constructed distance evaporates overnight.
Monk — Wright Bellamy, to the world; Monk, always, to Verity — is a musician of extraordinary talent, the kind of artist who wears his emotions close to the surface in his music even when he buries them in real life. He agreed to collaborate on this biopic for reasons of his own. He did not agree to spend his days working alongside the woman who broke him open at twenty-two and walked away.
What Kennedy Ryan does brilliantly in Score is refuse to make anyone a villain. Verity's reasons for leaving are not simple or petty — they're rooted in something she has spent years not fully understanding about herself. During the course of the novel, she receives a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and that revelation reshapes not only how she sees her present life but how she understands her past decisions — the impulsive ones, the ones that confused her, the ones that hurt people she loved.
Ryan handles this with extraordinary grace. The mental health representation in Score is among the best I have read in any genre. It's honest, it's humanising, it's clinically accurate without being clinical in tone, and it never becomes a plot device. It's simply part of who Verity is, and watching her integrate that understanding into her sense of self — and into her relationship with Monk — is one of the most moving narrative arcs I've encountered in a long time.
The Harlem Renaissance backdrop, too, is handled with deep respect and richness. The research is evident, the history is woven through the story with purpose, and it adds a layer of cultural and artistic resonance that elevates the whole novel. These two people are making something beautiful about love and legacy, and they're doing it while falling in love with each other again. The meta-textual beauty of that is not lost.
Author's Style and Craft
Kennedy Ryan is one of the finest prose stylists working in romance today. Her sentences have a rhythm and a weight to them that feels almost musical — appropriate, given that one of her heroes is a musician, and given that the whole novel hums with the energy of artistic creation. She writes desire and longing with extraordinary precision, finding the specific detail — a look, a gesture, a silence held a beat too long — that makes the abstract emotional feel viscerally physical.
What makes Score particularly special is Ryan's willingness to slow down for the hard stuff. She doesn't skip over Verity's mental health journey to get back to the romance faster. She honours it. She sits in it. And in doing so, she writes one of the most fully realised female characters I've encountered in genre romance — a woman who is brilliant and complicated and capable of both extraordinary love and significant self-protection.
The secondary characters in Score are also unusually well-drawn, which is a hallmark of Ryan's work across all her books.
Themes and Deeper Meaning
Score is a book about the past — specifically, about the choices we made before we fully understood ourselves, and whether those choices can be forgiven by the people we made them against and by ourselves. Verity's arc is about radical self-knowledge: learning who she actually is, why she did the things she did, and whether that understanding is enough to build something real on.
Monk's arc, conversely, is about the risk of reopening something that almost destroyed you. He has survived Verity once. He has rebuilt. And loving her again means accepting the possibility of that same devastation — which is one of the bravest things any person, fictional or otherwise, can choose.
There's also a beautiful meditation running through the novel about artistic collaboration and intimacy — how the act of making something together strips away performance and forces a kind of honesty that nothing else can produce. These two people can't hide from each other in the creative process, and the novel uses that beautifully.
Readers who appreciated the emotional complexity and the full, messy humanity of the characters in our review of The Devious Husband by Catharina Maura will find similar riches here — characters with genuine histories and genuine scars navigating what comes next.
For more stand-out reads this season, our 10 Must-Read Romance Books from April 2026 has more picks you'll want to add to your list.
What This Book Gets Absolutely Right
Mental health representation. Verity's bipolar disorder diagnosis is handled with care, accuracy, and complete humanity. It is not a plot device or a quirk — it is a part of her character that is treated with the respect it deserves.
The emotional complexity of second-chance love. Ryan does not let her characters — or her readers — off the hook. The history between Verity and Monk has weight and consequences, and the novel insists that those consequences be reckoned with honestly.
The Harlem Renaissance setting. The research is evident, the cultural specificity is beautiful, and the history feels genuinely honoured rather than used as decoration.
Prose quality. Ryan's writing is a cut above — elegant, rhythmic, emotionally precise. There are passages in this book that read like poetry.
The payoff. The reunion, when it comes, has been so thoroughly earned by everything that precedes it that it hits with the full force of everything you've invested in these characters. It is a magnificent ending.
Where the Book Could Have Gone Further
The industry subplot. The Hollywood backdrop offers some interesting texture, but occasionally the behind-the-scenes mechanics of the biopic production feel underdeveloped relative to the richness of the central relationship.
Monk's support network. We get glimpses of his circle, but I would have loved a deeper look at the community around him — the people who held him up after Verity, and what their reaction to her return looked like in full.
The diagnosis timeline. While the representation is beautifully handled, there are moments where the pace of Verity's understanding of her own diagnosis felt slightly accelerated for narrative convenience.
Books to Read If You Loved This One
Before I Let Go by Kennedy Ryan — Ryan's debut breakout novel and the first Hollywood Renaissance book. If Score is your entry point, go back and read this immediately.
Icebreaker by Hannah Grace — Another second-chance story with deep emotional stakes and characters you root for completely.
The Idea of You by Robinne Lee — A romance between two people navigating both emotional history and public scrutiny, with similar richness of character and cultural setting.
Who Should Read This Book
Score is for readers who want their romance to have genuine emotional depth — who want the love story to feel hard-won and completely real. It's for anyone who has ever had to reckon with their own past decisions and wonder whether understanding them too late meant losing something irretrievable. It's for Kennedy Ryan fans who have been waiting for this book since Reel, and for new readers looking for a romance novel that will stay with them.
For help building your next reading list, visit our What to Read Next guide.
Content warnings: Bipolar disorder diagnosis and mental health themes (sensitively handled), emotional pain from past relationship, grief, and brief discussion of the impact of creative industry pressure. On-page intimate scenes.
How This Book Made Me Feel
I've been thinking about Score since I finished it, which is the clearest sign I know that a book has done its job. There's a scene between Verity and Monk — in a studio, both of them exhausted and honest and out of armour — where she tells him something about herself that she has never said out loud to another person, and he just stays. He doesn't run. He doesn't fix. He just stays. And I had to put the book down and breathe for a minute, because that's what we all want, isn't it? To be truly known and have someone stay.
Kennedy Ryan writes love as an act of courage — not the easy, Hollywood-movie kind, but the real kind that requires you to know yourself well enough to offer yourself honestly to another person. Score is her boldest, most emotionally complete work yet, and I feel privileged to have read it.
Final Verdict
Score by Kennedy Ryan is one of the year's essential romance reads — a second-chance love story of extraordinary emotional intelligence, featuring one of the most compassionate mental health portrayals I have ever read in the genre. It will make you laugh, ugly cry, and put your hand over your heart more than once. This is the kind of romance that reminds you why the genre exists.
★★★★★ — 5 out of 5 stars
About the Author
Kennedy Ryan is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of Before I Let Go, Long Shot, Block Shot, and many more beloved romance novels. She is known for her emotionally rich storytelling, diverse characters, and willingness to tackle complex and important themes with honesty and grace. She recently signed a first-look deal at Universal Studio Group, with a Before I Let Go series in development at Peacock.
🌐 Visit her at kennedyryanwrites.com
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FAQs — Score by Kennedy Ryan
1. Do I need to read Reel (Hollywood Renaissance #1) before Score? It helps to read Reel first for context and to understand the Hollywood Renaissance world, but Score can stand on its own. That said, Reel is excellent, so why not read both?
2. How does Score handle the bipolar disorder representation? Exceptionally. Kennedy Ryan conducted thoughtful research and the portrayal is sensitive, accurate, and humanising. Readers with lived experience of bipolar disorder have highlighted this as some of the best mental health representation in romance fiction.
3. Is Score a spicy romance? Yes — there are on-page intimate scenes, and the physical tension between Verity and Monk is electric throughout. But the emotional depth is equal to the heat, which is what makes the book so powerful.
4. Is Kennedy Ryan's writing style accessible? Yes — her prose is beautiful but never inaccessible. She writes clearly and emotionally, and readers across all experience levels with literary fiction and genre romance will find her voice warm and engaging.
5. What makes Score different from other second-chance romances? The mental health layer, the Harlem Renaissance backdrop, the quality of the prose, and Kennedy Ryan's refusal to oversimplify either character. This is second-chance romance elevated.
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