Jodi Culliney’s Excess Baggage is a warm and emotionally tangled romance about Tess Lefferts, a Brooklyn baker on a cross-country train trip with her gloriously blunt pregnant sister Ruth, and Sam Charles, a writer trying to finish the third book in his series while avoiding airplanes and his own loneliness. Tess is engaged to Josh, her childhood sweetheart, but the farther the train carries her, the more her old life starts to feel like a dress that no longer fits. What begins with lost glasses, monster cookies, a missing engagement ring, and a too-charming waiter named Todd slowly becomes a story about desire, timing, family, and the hard, frightening work of admitting when the safe choice has become the wrong one.

I was surprised by how much I liked the book’s messy emotional honesty. Tess could have easily become a simple “woman torn between two men” heroine, but she feels more bruised and specific than that. Her panic isn’t just about Sam. It’s about being unseen by Josh, being edited down by the life she thought she wanted, and still feeling obligated to honor the girl who once loved him. The train setting gives the romance a lovely sense of suspension, like Tess and Sam are living inside a pocket of borrowed time. Their conversations over tea, wine, Van Morrison, and Sam’s writing have that dreamy almost-unreal quality travel can create, but the book is smart enough to let reality rush back in. I especially liked the ache of Sam’s lost letter, because it turns a romantic misunderstanding into something sharper than a gimmick. Both of them are waiting, wounded, and misreading silence as rejection.

The writing is at its strongest when it leans into intimacy and familial texture. Ruth is a scene-stealer, profane and tender and meddlesome in ways that made me laugh even when I wanted to shake her. Her hiding of the ring and later the invitation is not exactly defensible, but it feels rooted in fierce sisterly terror rather than plot machinery, and that gives the story some bite. I also appreciated how food, music, and books keep threading through the emotional life of the novel. Tess’s baking, especially the monster cookies tied to her grandmother and childhood kitchen, gives her softness and history. Sam’s writer’s block breaking open after meeting Tess is a little grand, but it works because the book is so sincerely interested in how love can reawaken a person’s voice. At times, the prose can run hot, with repeated intensities and a few moments where the longing circles the same feeling, but I didn’t mind much. The excess is part of the book’s unique feel.

The novel isn’t really arguing for impulsive romance so much as it’s arguing for self-recognition, for the courage to stop performing gratitude for a life that’s quietly draining you. I closed the book with affection for its big feelings, its sisterly chaos, and its belief that sometimes the person who helps you lose your baggage is also the one who sees you most clearly. I’d recommend Excess Baggage to readers who enjoy emotional, character-driven contemporary romance with family drama, slow-burn yearning, fated timing, and a heroine who has to break her own heart a little before she can choose joy.

Pages 274 | ASIN: B0D6DWKSLN