Submission 2785

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Author: Annabel Monaghan

Published: 2026

Genre: English

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This book is handpicked by the IBC Editorial Team. If you are an author, publisher, or reader and would like to have a book reviewed by IBC, you may reach us at editorial@indianbookclub.com — we’ll be happy to review it.

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Some people are so practiced at holding everything together that they have forgotten what it feels like to put something down. Dolly All the Time is a love story, but more precisely, it is a story about a woman learning, at thirty-nine, that asking for help is not the same as failing. Dolly Brick returns to Whitfield, Rhode Island, for the summer with her son and a familiar weight: the family home is at risk, her father and brother need managing, and she, as always, is the one who will sort it out. When a chance encounter with the annoyingly handsome Stewart Whitfield leads to a fake dating arrangement, neither of them is prepared for what genuine proximity will require of them. Warm, funny, and emotionally generous, this is summer romance at its most satisfying.

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Dolly Brick has been solving problems since she was twelve years old, which is when her mother left,t and the role of family anchor quietly became hers. Now thirty-nine, a single mother, and in possession of a competence so deeply ingrained it has become a personality trait, she arrives in Whitfield for the summer with one mission: keep her father and brother from losing the family home. Her own needs, as always, are not on the list. Stewart Whitfield is the kind of man who looks, on paper, like he has everything arranged. He has the name, the money, the coastal Rhode Island pedigree. What he has most visibly at the moment Dolly encounters him, however, is a flat tyre and the fresh humiliation of a very public breakup. Dolly helps because that is what Dolly does. What Stewart proposes is practical: a fake relationship, public enough to manage the social fallout from his ended engagement, low-stakes enough for both of them. What actually develops is neither practical nor low-stakes. As their arrangement moves from organised dinners and charity benefits into something more genuine, both of them are confronted with the specific discomfort of being truly seen by another person. Monaghan surrounds her central romance with a supporting cast that gives the novel real texture. Dolly's son, her brother Christopher, her best friend Naomi, and the complicated architecture of a family held together by one person's relentless effort all contribute to a story that is warmer and more emotionally layered than its premise might suggest. The Rhode Island coastal setting does considerable work too, lending the novel a sun-drenched, salt-aired quality that feels genuinely earned.

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“The exhaustion of being the capable one”: Dolly is, to borrow a phrase that will be immediately recognisable to a significant portion of readers, an eldest daughter in spirit if not always in birth order. She has organised her entire identity around being the person who does not need to be looked after, and the novel is deeply attentive to what this costs. The competence is real, and it is genuinely admirable, but it is also a form of self-protection, a way of ensuring that she never has to be in the position of needing something she might not get. Monaghan treats this with both affection and honesty, never pathologising Dolly's self-sufficiency but making visible the loneliness it generates. “What it means to be seen without flinching”: The fake dating premise is a vehicle for something more interesting than its genre conventions usually require: the gradual experience of being known. Stewart does not fall for the version of Dolly she presents to the world; he falls for the version she tries not to show anyone. The novel is interested in this specific quality of attention, in the difference between being noticed and being seen, and in the terror and relief of the latter. “Family is the thing you are always working on”: The romantic plot runs alongside a family storyline that is, in some ways, the novel's emotional heart. Dolly's relationships with her father, her brother Christopher, and her son constitute a web of love and worry and unspoken history that Monaghan renders with genuine warmth. Christopher's storyline in particular carries a quiet emotional power, and the novel's understanding of how maternal worry never fully resolves, how a mother carries her child's difficulties in her body long after the immediate crisis has passed, is one of its most authentic achievements. "The particular intimacy of small gestures”: Monaghan is a writer who understands that the most significant romantic moments are rarely the grand ones. The hand-holding, the quiet compliments, the single scene in which Dolly steadies Stewart during a moment of genuine distress, these are the scenes that accumulate into something the reader believes in. The novel earns its romance not through declarations but through an accumulation of small, specific attentions, which is, it turns out, exactly how trust is built in real life too.

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The scene where Dolly steadies Stewart. It is a relatively quiet moment by thriller standards, but it is the novel's most emotionally precise. Stewart, who has been the one extending care and attention toward Dolly throughout much of the novel, is suddenly the person who needs to be held. That Dolly is the one who can do it, and that she does it without making it a transaction, is the point at which the relationship stops being a performance and becomes something real. Monaghan earns the moment, and it lands accordingly. Stewart's courtship in the minor key. His compliments, his steadiness, his willingness to make himself available without making demands, accumulate in a way that feels genuinely romantic rather than merely swoony. He is not a flashy romantic lead; he is a careful one, and the novel understands that for someone like Dolly, careful is more meaningful than dramatic. The moments when his feelings surface in understated language are the ones readers will return to. Naomi. Every novel needs a best friend who tells the truth, and Naomi is one of the better examples of the form. Funny, perceptive, and operating with complete loyalty to Dolly while also being entirely unwilling to let her get away with her own evasions, she provides both comic relief and genuine emotional ballast. Her presence makes Dolly more legible, because we see Dolly reflected in someone who has known her long enough to see through the capable surface. The Rhode Island setting. Monaghan uses the coastal summer setting with real skill. The boat rides, the light on the water, the specific texture of a small town where history and reputation travel ahead of you, all of it contributes to an atmosphere that feels like both escape and reckoning. The setting is not decorative; it is doing thematic work, holding the story's questions about inheritance, belonging, and the possibility of beginning again.

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Dolly All the Time is for readers who come to romance fiction not just for the love story but for the fullness around it, for the friendships, the family complications, the protagonist's interior life, the sense that there is a whole real person at the centre of the romance rather than simply a vehicle for the plot. If fake dating is your preferred romantic mechanic, this is one of the better examples of the form, primarily because Monaghan does not rely on the premise to do the emotional heavy lifting. The arrangement sets the characters in motion, but what develops between them is grounded in genuine characterisation rather than genre convention. The chemistry feels organic rather than engineered, and the slow build rewards the reader's patience. Readers who connect with heroines defined by competence, self-reliance, and the particular burden of being the person everyone leans on will find Dolly immediately recognisable. There is a very specific kind of reader, the one who has spent years being the capable friend, the responsible sibling, the person who quietly holds things together, for whom this novel will feel like being understood. Monaghan writes Dolly with enough specificity to avoid the trap of making her merely a type, and her emotional arc, the gradual, reluctant, eventually joyful discovery that she is allowed to be looked after, is handled with real grace. For readers who enjoy summer romance with genuine emotional substance alongside the warmth and the coastal atmosphere, Dolly All the Time delivers that combination with considerable skill. It is the kind of novel that makes you want to start again from the beginning the moment you finish it, not because you need to know what happens, but because you are not quite ready to leave.

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This review is part of the Indian Book Club’s editorial initiative to spotlight books that inspire, inform, and leave a lasting impact on readers. Every title featured is carefully handpicked and reviewed by the IBC Editorial Team to maintain quality, authenticity, and literary value. If you are an author, publisher, or reader and would like to submit a book for review, we’d be delighted to hear from you. Please write to us at: editorial@indianbookclub.com Our team personally evaluates each submission, and selected books are featured as official IBC Editorial Reviews on our platform.

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