The Year of Cecily

In Lin’s middling debut, the first in the From Sunset Park, with Love series, a pair of former fiancés get a second chance at romance after they unexpectedly meet again while both flying home to Brooklyn for Lunar New Year. Attorney Cecily Chang is stuck in a rut and decides on a list of Lunar New Year’s resolutions to “spice up her life.” These resolutions certainly do not include reconciling with the ex who dropped out of med school and out of her life 10 years before the start of the book, but in their decade apart, Jeffrey Lee has figured out what he wants: to be a Hollywood screenwriter—and to get back together with Cecily. When fate reunites them, he’s determined to achieve both ambitions. The pacing of their rekindling love story is clunky, and the flimsy framework of Cecily’s New Year’s resolutions does little to bolster the plot or even push the heroine toward growth. Lin often gets lost in the atmospheric details, providing an appealing layer of cultural specificity but also occasionally resulting in a flurry of irrelevant information. Readers will hope that Lin works out the kinks in future installments. Agent: Courtney Miller-Callihan, Handspun Literary. (Jan.)