Kind by Hannah Leigh

My rating: 4 of 5 stars Goodreads | Amazon | Bookbub | Genres: cozy romance book, cozy MM romance

Introduction

Kind by Hannah Leigh is a cozy romance book where two flawed and real characters come together in a refreshing and realistic romance that subtly takes on complex issues with a well-rounded brush, creating both a nuanced narrative and fully developed characters who have motivations that extend beyond just getting together with a love interest and having a happily ever after. Because of this, I found Kind to be more than just a run-of-the-mill MM romance. It’s a character study and would be well-categorized as LGBTQ fiction. It does have spice, but it’s a rare gem in the MM romance genre because it focuses on whole characters, and the plot isn’t fully centered on the development of a romance.  

Blurb 

A recovering workaholic and a recovering jerk find love at a community volunteer group.

Drew’s life needs to change. He knows he’s a workaholic—he worked so hard that he literally ended up in the hospital. Now he’s recovering, but he doesn’t know how to fix things. What is this relaxing that everyone always talks about?

He’ll try joining a volunteer group. That’s not work, right? So it doesn’t count.

Ellis has been a jerk for his entire life—until he finally lost enough friends to wake him up. He’s turned over a new leaf, but he barely knows how to be a person, let alone a good one. How do you be kind without being fake?

He’ll try joining a volunteer group. That’s what good people do, right?

Kind: A Romance Where Nothing Bad Happens is the story of a recovering workaholic and a recovering jerk who find love at a community volunteer group. It has NO crises, NO breakups, and NO long dark nights of the soul—just a slow climb out of misery and into happiness.

Overall Impressions

Hannah Leigh releases her debut novel with Kind. I wasn’t sure what the blurb was getting at when it branded Kind as a cozy romance book where nothing bad happens. But that’s what the reader gets, and with everything *gestures vaguely* being like it is, I think readers really, really need to find some joy in the world right now. I was very happy to immerse myself in a world where characters work to better their community and work on themselves. Characters have complex lives, motivations, and perspectives. I think I needed to read this book this week for my own sanity. 

The main characters, Drew and Ellis, feel real, like they could be people you know. The book’s setting is also super believable and real. Overall, Kind knocks it completely out of the park. Kind impressed me very much, and I enjoyed getting to know the characters in the novel. 

Flawed Characters are Good Characters

One thing I enjoyed was that Drew and Ellis are flawed. Kind, branded as a cozy romance book, is not set in a world where nothing is wrong. Kind’s world is realistic, the real world. But nothing huge and dramatical happens. In Kind, characters are self-aware. They recognize shortcomings and are working on themselves. Sometimes they fail. Sometimes they gripe about their shortcomings and want to give up, just go back to what they’re used to. 

Drew and Ellis don’t even like each other much at first, like at all. The development of their friendship and then how it blossoms into more is so real and human. It’s not over-the-top romance, but at the same time, it is so romantic. 

Drew

Drew is a workaholic who, while recovering from a serious accident, realizes that he needs to learn how step away from work at the end of the day, at a normal time. He also needs to learn to enjoy himself. Drew reads as a little neurodivergent, like he is hyper-focused on his career. He seems like he’s been fixated on finding success from a young age and never developing the muscles for activities that don’t directly contribute to developing his future successes. 

I can see this over-fixation on serious things tracing back to his youth. Drew was likely the kid who focused on academics to the detriment of his social life throughout secondary and post-secondary school. 

Too Much Work and No Play…

In the end, though, what does that get him? A disaster, that’s what. His workaholic ways nearly cost him everything. A bad car accident after he nods off at the wheel is the wake-up call he needs. His injuries were severe enough to have him in PT months later. Frustrated, pulled down by chronic pain, his recuperation progresses more slowly than he’d like. 

Resonated with Me

His frustration resonated strongly with me, as I broke my ankle last January. I had surgery, did months of PT, and have struggled with the rate of my recovery. Chronic pain also plagued me, just like Drew. 

My recovery journey is ongoing, and I felt like I walked next to Drew with every step he struggled with, every step he took, every time he realized he couldn’t finish his walk without a lot of pain. So yeah, Drew’s story meshed with my recent struggles in a way that I just felt his struggle. 

Change is Hard

While Drew recognizes that he has to change this about himself so he doesn’t repeat his nearly fatal mistake, he doesn’t know how to make those changes. Plus, his job demands the crazy hours that led to his accident in the first place; it wasn’t all his fault. Eventually, he forces himself to make big changes to have a healthier work-life balance. 

Volunteering: A lot like work

One outlet is a community volunteer group that Drew joined recently. His responsibilities include planning and organizing the summer community BBQ. That definitely seems like a lot of work, and I really love how he thinks planning this will be just like delegating and planning projects at work.

He starts by transferring some of his workaholic habits onto his volunteerism hours, but it’s a start. Ellis joins the group and is quickly assigned to help Drew out on his BBQ party. Drew learns he cannot treat working on a volunteer project like his projects at work. This actually calls for people skills.  

People Skills

Drew sucks at people skills. Drew is pretty terrible at being anything but a worker-bee architect. While he comes off as unfriendly at first, he seems real. Someone who works like he does 80+ hour weeks wouldn’t be bubbly and friendly, especially if this work ethic stems from a lifetime of overachievement and an overemphasis on work as his main identity.

Ellis

Ellis is our second main character. He leads Drew to realize that working on a volunteer project isn’t like big projects at work. Ellis joins the volunteer group, unsure, out of his depth, and overwhelmed. But he’s there, working through his discomfort, and joins Drew in organizing the BBQ. He stands up for himself by telling Drew off for being a jerk to him. And Drew is a jerk to him, at first. Drew doesn’t like him at first. There’s no spark of attraction at all. To find this in a romance novel is honestly such a refreshing thing, which sounds funny to write, but it was. 

Perfectly Flawed

Ellis is a wonderfully flawed character. A recovering Internet troll, stuck living with a toxic ex, also an Internet troll, he has a change of heart and works to change who he is, how he deals with the world, and start over from a seven-year relationship with the toxic ex. Ellis doesn’t believe he can change, but he is changing. 

Therapy Helps

Therapy guides Ellis to try out new approaches to human interactions. Over the last few months, he has implemented new behaviors and seen results. He remains deeply insecure, though, worried that his newfound skills are just a facade, that they are a mask that at any moment could take off and reveal that he’s still that horrible person underneath. Ellis’s worrying about that shows the reader that Ellis has changed. The Ellis readers meet is not Internet troll Ellis. Ellis makes me believe it is possible that an Internet troll could see the error of his ways and do an about-face. 

Escape to a Meeting

A fight with his ex leads him to the volunteer meeting. He agrees to help Drew with the BBQ, much to Drew’s displeasure. They start adversarial, mostly because Drew is being an ass to Ellis. But because of Ellis’s history, he stands up for himself and essentially says hey asshole, back off. It works, and is just the push Drew needs to really analyze himself and how he moves through the world. They counter one another well even before they like each other, truthfully.

Slow Steps to Friendship

In slow, baby steps, Drew and Ellis become friendly. They help each other move. Ellis offers Drew advice on how to unwind and relax. He gives him advice on how to engage in small talk. Ellis is offering Drew lessons on how to be a functional three-dimensional human. From the outside perspective, it reads a bit like the blind leading the blind. But for both of these characters, it just works. Ellis’s advice to fake it till you make it is about as human and real as it gets. 

By the end of the story, we have two characters who really, truly grow as people, not just as a part of a relationship. 

Full Characters 

That’s the true heart of this cozy romance book: the characters feel real. Drew and Ellis exist in their world, they are not one-sided tropes. Being gay isn’t Drew’s whole identity. Nor is being Chinese. Being a nerd isn’t all Ellis is. They are written as full characters who have flaws and motivations beyond those tent poles of their personalities. So often, for the sake of a concise romance story, characters are not fully fleshed out like this. 

Kind could be a case study; it is such a good take on the characterization of romance characters. Other cozy romance books take note, this is how you develop characters.

Character Nuance

Culturally, I enjoyed that Drew being Chinese-American did not play into the why of him being an over-worker. The author avoids leaning too heavily on stereotypes. Drew is a workaholic. He’s also Chinese-American. But correlation is not causation. 

That being said, neither was his ethnic identity brushed over. He is Chinese-American. This is not treated as his entire identity any more than his being gay is. Drew seems like a real person. His family seems like a real family. I would love to play Xiangqi with his father and get advice from Yeye. 

Ellis, characterized as an internet troll and an unapologetic nerd, is also characterized in a way that I really appreciate. We have all met an Internet troll, be it virtually or in real life. This part of his personality feels deeply authentic. 

Ellis is entrenched in nerd culture, loves making video game references, and watching anime. But that isn’t his whole identity. His thoughts and feelings exist on their own, outside of the checkboxes of his archetypes. The problems he has and the things he wants to work on and change about himself, have very little to do with his interests or his sexual identity. I can’t exactly express how refreshing that was to read. 

Recommend or No?

Strong recommend here, this cozy romance book is a keeper! 

Review Paragraph

I received a free copy of this book via BookSirens and am voluntarily leaving a review. I write reviews on my blog, Goodreads, Bookbub, Amazon, and more. If you want me to read and review your upcoming novel read my review policy and submit a contact form.

An Aside:

I’ve been absent, sorry.