Book Review | Back After This by Linda Holmes

Feb 25

If you’re thinking about checking out Back After This yourself, don’t worry about spoilers. The first part of my reviews are always spoiler-free so you can see if the book is your cup of tea. After a quick summary and a basic review, I’ll give a spoiler warning and do a deep dive into everything I loved and hated about Back After This.

Though Back After This is the first I’ve read from Linda Holmes, it’s her third book, following Evie Drake Starts Over in 2019 and Flying Solo in 2022. One thing you’ll notice while looking through the website is that humor is a key part of her authorship—and I love that. Here’s a description straight from the author’s website:

“I'm a podcast host, novelist, culture critic, radio maker, interviewer, Twitter liker, Twitter fearer, dog owner, former lawyer, one-time college a cappella singer, occasional bread baker, photography dabbler, and very lucky weirdo.”

Book Cover: Back After This by Linda Holmes

Content Warning

I always like to give a quick content warning for any sensitive topics. These are some content warnings for Back After This:

Anxiety.
Sexual intimacy.
Work stress.

Quick Synopsis

Back After This is about Cecily Foster, a podcast expert working for a production company. She spends most of her time working on other peoples’ projects, but she’d love to someday produce a series of her own.

Her boss makes a deal with her—host a podcast about getting her shit together, and he’ll let her produce the podcast she wants. Cecily jumps right into making the podcast—working with a flashy influencer who insists she’ll only find her true love through a rigorous and thorough search.

But, like always, life has other plans, and the right guy for Cecily might not be from a careful, purposeful date. Cecily may not buy into all of Eliza’s bells and whistles, but by the end of the podcast, it seems that somehow, miraculously, she really has gotten her shit together.

My Rating

Everybody has to come up with their own system for judging and rating books, and here’s mine:

One star: I couldn’t finish the book. (DNF)
Two stars: I struggled to finish, but I did.
Three stars: This book was okay and worth reading.
Four stars: I liked this book and I would recommend it to a friend.
Five stars: I’d read this book again, and it’s going on my favorites shelf.

By no means do I think this is a perfect rating system, but I had to come up with something that would help me avoid arbitrarily assigning ratings. This provides a solid guideline for rating qualifications.

Back After This gets a four star from me because I liked it and would recommend it to a friend, but I wouldn’t read it again. My favorite thing about this book was the comedy—I actually laughed out loud several times while reading it, which is always a good sign.

I also thought Back After This was able to toe the line expertly between loveably quirky and unbelievably cringey, which helped it feel light and kind of cheesy without being too much.

My Recommendations

The Rom-Commers by Katherine Center

Back After This isn’t exactly a sweet romance, but the intimacy isn’t that explicit. If you like that level of intimacy in your romance, you may also enjoy The Rom-Commers. The humor in Back After This was my favorite part, and Katherine Center is also very funny.

Forget Me Not by Julie Soto

One thing I appreciated about Back After This was the focus on the main character’s passion. Forget Me Not, while definitely being more explicit with the intimacy, has the same vibe with the character’s wedding planning and florist careers.

Expiration Dates by Rebecca Serle

In Expiration Dates, the main character receives little slips of paper that let her know how long each of her relationships are destined to last. Reading that book gives you a quick overview of the people she’s dated, which Back After This does as well. It feels like each of them does a good job of examining the process of dating, and how you know if something will work out or not.

Summary

We’re now entering the spoiler-y part of this review. If you think Back After This sounds like your cup of tea, click away, read it, and come back to see if you agree or disagree with my critique. If you like the sound of the book but you don’t want to read it, don’t worry, I’ll give you the full rundown.

SPOILERS

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SPOILERS -

Back After This opens with Cecily suffering her way through managing the audio for a podcast. She begs the host not to make mouth noises and mess up the audio, but he doesn’t listen. Luckily—or maybe unluckily—she’s called to her boss’s office, where he starts to make her a deal.

The production company isn’t doing well, and they need a knock-out hit to keep from going under. The boss thinks this hit is going to be a podcast in which one hapless woman gets her shit together with the help of a life/dating coach—and he wants the woman to be Cecily.

She doesn’t want to do it, but the boss promises to let her produce a pilot for one of her many podcast ideas. Cecily also sweetens the deal by ensuring both she and her best friend will get to keep their jobs at the company.

It’s important to Cecily that she start a new project, as her last one was slipped right out from under. She started a podcast with her ex-boyfriend, and did most of the research and work for the project. Convinced he was going to propose any day, Cecily was shocked when he abruptly told her that he wasn’t in love with her anymore, and took the podcast with him when he left.

Right away, there are things about this new show that make her uncomfortable. From the questionable advertisements—food for single people, cat products, and a gym membership—to her interactions with the influencer, who has an all-white living room and strict rules about what can and can’t be consumed in the space.

Cecily is walking out her door one day when a dog goes flying past, a leash trailing behind him. Intrigued, she watches as a man also runs past, a cape flapping behind him as he chases after the dog.

Interested in the whole scene, Cecily follows, discovering the man has been chasing the dog for blocks, and the dog runs the second he gets close enough. Cecily pulls a jar of peanut butter from her bag and tempts the dog with it, getting him back.

We find out that Buddy—the dog—doesn’t actually belong to this man, and he was in the middle of a haircut when he saw the dog get loose, so he jumped up and started chasing after it.

They exchange numbers, and later he texts her to let her know the dog is safe and sound—and the person walking him was actually a volunteer, walking him for the shelter.

Cecily doesn’t carry on a long texting conversation with the dog-chaser—whose name is Will—because she has her podcast and dates to focus on. It’s on her first date that she sees Will again—he’s the waiter at the nice restaurant.

She has a hard time reminding herself to pay attention to her date, and not the waiter, and when the episode airs, the listeners are obsessed with Will, whom they name “Hot Waiter” and praise for his quippy remark about the guy Cecily was on a date with.

Eliza, the influencer, is quick to dismiss the idea that Cecily should go after the hot waiter from the episode, saying it’s far more important for women to be intentional in their choices when it comes to men. And so Cecily continues going on her dates with some perfectly fine guys, and some guys she could take or leave.

Meanwhile, the meet-cutes (or meet-agains?) just keep happening with Will. He turns out to be the photographer taking her new head shots. Cecily discovers he adopted the dog and officially renamed him Buddy. Will and Cecily get along great, and find it easy to talk to one another.

After her initial dates, Cecily chooses just one guy to see again—a doctor named Michael. The podcast is going well, and when she attends a podcast party at Eliza’s house, she’s surprised that Will shows up, invited for his role as “hot waiter” in the first episode.

Eliza finds her during the party and makes it clear that she doesn’t think romance should be spontaneous—that going for the chemistry is a mistake.

Later, Cecily sees Will again when she ducks out of the rain and finds him doing the same just inside the doors of a bank. While there, Will asks her to dog sit Buddy for her, and she agrees. When he comes back, they have food and Cecily shares what she likes about podcasts.

They’re getting along great, except Cecily is still dating Michael the doctor, and she needs to focus on that. After their chat about podcasts and audio, Cecily sends Will a file she uses to help train new editors, asking if he can figure out what’s wrong with it as a little test.

Days later, it’s pouring down rain when he shows up at her door, dripping wet, to tell her he figured out what was wrong with the file—no breathing.

The tension between them finally snaps, and when Will comes inside, they fall into each other. Cecily and Will continue to see each other. Cecily meets Will’s sister. They talk about their exes and what brought them to D.C.

Then, one morning when Cecily is leaving his place, Eliza comes across them kissing on the sidewalk. She’s obviously upset—this could stand to ruin the podcast, and specifically her approach to finding love.

In her panic of the moment, Cecily makes some comments about Will that she shouldn’t. He turns around and goes inside, and things just continue to go downhill from there. At work, lay-offs still happen despite the success of Cecily’s show.

She finds out her best friend, Julie, is leaving the production company for a new job in New York City. And then, as the crux of it all, Eliza accidentally forwards an email chain to Cecily that shows Cecily’s boss and multiple other people have been talking behind her back, manipulating the situation, lying to her.

Cecily apologizes to Will and her horrible ex shows up outside her building. She finds out he’s going to be involved in the company through a merger, and that’s when she decides to quit, for the first time in the book taking her own life in her hands and going after what she wants, rather than going along for the ride.

Will helps her with her things after she quits her job, and the story ends with Cecily deciding she doesn’t want to let the podcast’s finale go up without telling the truth. With help from her best friend and the other people working on the show, they manage to re-work the final episode to tell the truth—that Cecily managed to fall in love with a man she met all on her own.

Deep Dive

Okay, now that you’re caught up on what happens in this book, let’s get into my thoughts on it. When I started reading Back After This, I was coming off a few DNFs—books that had me heading in a dangerous reading slump territory.

Luckily, Back After This was immediately enjoyable. I loved the main character’s voice. She managed to walk the very fine line between funny and cringy, giving us jaded comments without seeming overly pessimistic or Millennial.

I enjoyed Will’s introduction, and thought again that the book did a good job of making their first meeting interesting, but not too unbelievable. We also have the subtle conflict between Cecily and Julie—something that felt very realistic, a true account of how best friends can sometimes not understand exactly what they’re doing wrong.

Back After This managed to surprise me in a lot of ways. When we first meet Eliza, the influencer, I was fully prepared for this book to give me a caricature of a person—that’s what a lot of books do when handling the subject of the influencer.

But that’s not where this went. Like with the initial meeting between Will and Cecily, the book managed to balance certain details about Eliza—the fact that she only drinks white wine in her house to protect her pristine white furniture—with the fact that despite that, she is definitively still human.

Capable of wanting to help others and making mistakes in pursuit of it. By the end of this book, we’re able to see that Eliza is smart and right about a lot of things, and still manages to be mean. Just like, I’m sure, many of the women we know in real life.

This is less of a criticism and more of an observation—the parts of the book I enjoyed least were those with the sister. I’m not sure if that’s just a personal preference, or if the sister needed more development as a character. They were far from being bad, but I felt they lacked a certain sparkle, especially compared to Cecily’s interactions with Will and Eliza.

Before getting into this review, I recommended that you check out Forget Me Not by Julie Soto. There’s a certain element I love in books that’s kind of hard to describe, but basically, it’s when the main character is really into something, and I get to sink into their knowledge and experience when reading the book. I love to really feel the passion for whatever that thing is, and when a book has it, that’s what really makes it sparkle.

It’s kind of hard to explain, but I’ll give a few examples to help. Carrie Soto is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid is one of those books for me, following a retired tennis star as she re-enters the game to protect her record. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow and the world of video game design. A Love Song for Ricki Wilde and flowers. Not Another Love Song by Julie Soto and orchestra. There are a lot of food-related fiction books like this, including Sourdough by Robin Sloan and The Seven Year Slip by Ashley Poston.

Basically, I love reading a book in which it’s clear the writer has a passion—or at least an interest—in something, and that gets passed to the main character. Which then gets passed to me.

Unfortunately, I wouldn’t really categorize this book that way. While there were a few moments in which we saw the main character’s love for audio coming through, the bulk of the book definitely focused on her interaction with Will, Eliza, and her dates, and there wasn’t as much of the podcast or production specific stuff.

Which isn’t necessarily bad—I may be in the minority of having this preference, but I would have liked the book to be a bit longer if that meant more content about podcasting, editing, and everything else our character is clearly passionate about.

All in all, I really enjoyed Back After This. It was a super easy read and actually made me laugh out loud. I’d definitely recommend it if you’re looking for a lighthearted romance. If you enjoy meet cutes and rom coms, you may like Back After This.

If you’re interested in any of the books I mentioned, please consider shopping for them through my affiliate links in the description.

As always, you can follow me on Goodreads or Instagram to learn more about what I’m reading now and what I plan to read next.

Thanks for watching!

These area some books I may read next:

Scot and Bothered by Alexandra Kiley
Shoot Your Shot by Lexi LaFleur Brown
The Other People by C.B. Everett

Deion Malloy