No Judgments

No Judgments is Meg Cabot’s 2019 contemporary romance, the first book in her Little Bridge Island series set in a fictional Florida Keys community. Meg Cabot is best known for her Princess Diaries young adult series and for various other YA bestsellers, but her adult contemporary romance work has been a steady part of her output across her career and No Judgments shows her at her most confident in the adult romance corner.

The novel follows Bree Beckham, a young woman who has fled her wealthy Manhattan family and her difficult fiance for the small Florida Keys community of Little Bridge Island. Bree has been working as a waitress and trying to figure out what she actually wants from her life when a major hurricane heads directly toward the island. As most of the residents evacuate, Bree decides to ride out the storm at her small rental cottage, with her cat for company. Drew Hartwell, a Little Bridge native and the nephew of Bree’s landlords, decides he is not leaving Bree alone in a Category Five hurricane and stays behind to help her survive the storm and its aftermath.

Meg Cabot writes contemporary romance with the kind of warm humor and quick pacing that her young adult work has been known for. The hurricane plot gives her room to deliver both the practical danger of the storm and the slowly developing romance between Bree and Drew across the days when the island is cut off from the mainland and the wider world. The forced proximity setup is one of the most reliable in romance, and the hurricane gives Cabot a particularly compelling reason for the proximity to be real and dangerous rather than just convenient.

The Little Bridge Island setting is rendered with the kind of affection that distinguishes Cabot’s best contemporary work. The small island community, with its year round residents whose lives are organized around the seasonal tourism economy and the practical realities of life in the hurricane zone, becomes one of the central pleasures of the novel. The wider Little Bridge cast that the rest of the series would develop is established here, with various neighbors, family members, and friends providing the recurring supporting world.

For longtime Meg Cabot fans curious about her adult contemporary romance work, No Judgments is a satisfying entry. For new readers, the standalone nature of the central romance makes it an accessible introduction to her adult fiction. The Little Bridge Island series continued with No Offense and No Words, with each book focused on a different couple in the connected island community.