Second Chances & Healing Old Wounds “Score”

Kennedy Ryan’s latest Hollywood Renaissance romance is sensual, emotionally ambitious, and most compelling when love has to make room for grief

Score was one of my most anticipated books of the year. I had been waiting for it since finishing Reel, which is admittedly an unfairly high bar for any follow-up.

The second book in Kennedy Ryan’s Hollywood Renaissance series follows Verity, an award-winning Black bisexual screenwriter, and Monk, a world-renowned musician. They were deeply in love in college before a devastating breakup sent them in different directions. A decade later, they are reunited to work on an Oscar-buzzworthy biopic about the Harlem Renaissance.

So…second-chance romance, creative collaboration, old wounds, and two extremely talented people forced back into each other’s orbit. Count me in!

This is Kennedy Ryan doing what she does best. The romance is sizzling and deeply sensual, but it is never detached from the rest of the characters’ lives. Verity and Monk do not simply have to decide whether they still love each other. They have to confront the people they have become since the relationship ended—and whether those newer selves can build something the younger versions of them could not sustain.

Here, the romance was not what stayed with me most, but the care that KR brings to the identity, sexuality, mental health, grief, and loss that the characters are experiences. These subjects aren’t just used as solemn side plots added to give the love story more weight. They shape how Verity and Monk understand intimacy, what they fear repeating, and what each believes love can reasonably ask of another person.

That is what makes Ryan’s romances feel so emotionally layered. She continues to illustrate that love may be transformative, but it is not a cure. It cannot erase history, resolve grief on someone else’s behalf, or make old pain irrelevant. What it can do is create enough safety for two people to hopefully (if they’re daring enough) tell the truth about what they are carrying.

Like in Reel, the Harlem Renaissance film being developed in the backdrop of the novel also gives it a larger frame. Verity and Monk are not only revisiting their private past; they are helping tell a story about Black art, memory, and cultural inheritance. Their creative work raises its own questions about who gets remembered and how artists translate history without flattening the people who lived it.

Did I think the book was about fifty pages too long? Yes. The story has several past-and-present threads to resolve, and I understand why it needed room, but the pacing occasionally felt stretched by the weight of everything it wanted to hold.

Still, Score delivered. I did not love it quite as much as Reel, but I had a great time reading it. It is passionate, thoughtful, and full of the emotional seriousness Ryan brings to the romance genre without ever forgetting that the romance should also be hot. And this was…hot.

I hear a third Hollywood Renaissance book is in the works. If it follows the couple I suspect it will, I am already sat.

Can’t wait.

Happy reading, x!