Book Smart Kate

Book: 🌟🌟🌟🌟 Spice: 🚪

By Katherine Center

Sadie, a struggling portrait artist, just got her big break as a finalist in the North American Portrait Society competition. She is on her way to celebrate with bottles of wine in hand, but the next thing she knows, she is in the hospital. A horrifying side effect of surgery is face blindness (a real thing: https://www.faceblind.org/). A portrait artist who needs to paint the best portrait of her career in the next six weeks, and every face is a chaotic blur of features. As she struggles to gain footing in this new reality, she unexpectedly falls for two very opposite men with whom she crosses paths.

Sadie is an adorably quirky character with a ton of depth born from heartbreak, struggle, and loss. She has a profoundly loving found family that counterbalances a horrific stepsister and complicated parents. 

Bigger than the romance are important themes of how much we rely on faces to frame identities, confirmation bias, that it takes less energy to be kind than cruel, how hard it can be to ask for help, and the harm we can do to those we love when we try to protect them. I highly recommend you also read the author’s note at the end.

Thank you to Katherine Center, Netgalley, and St. Martin’s Press for the ARC of this lovely book that is available on July 11, 2023