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 This book had everything I needed and everything I didn’t know I needed. Longing. Families born and found. Big dreams. Demisexual rep. And mosh pits.

Sloane Donavan is a 24-year-old trying to make a name for herself as a music journalist in Cleveland (shoutout to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame!) while also trying to move on from the one big romance of her life: an intense summer tour relationship with Dax Nakamura, the lead singer of the metal band Final Revelations. At the end of the summer, Dax asked Sloane to stay with him and tour with the band, but Sloane chose her career dreams instead and decided to end the relationship. The story starts at the Battle of the Bands 2010, when they run into each other for the first time in three years.

The lights dim as the next band takes the stage to enthusiastic applause, and it’s only that which saves Dax Nakamura from being recognized by a crowd of metalheads. Over six feet tall, half Black, half Japanese, industry bad boy turned straight edge and every groupie’s white whale, he couldn’t blend in if he tried. … I knew seeing him again was an inevitability. I just thought I was prepared for it.

I could not have been more wrong. 

He leans down, lessening the difference in our heights, his lips brushing against my hair, the evergreen smell of him surrounding me once more. “Hi, Sloane.”

My eyes snap open, the low timbre of his voice like velvet, my skin tingling like static between silk sheets, something inside me waking up after a three-year nap.

And that, friends, was all it took to hook me completely. I didn’t matter that I know next to nothing about metal or punk. I ceased caring about things like needing to sleep. What I needed was to stay in this gorgeously drawn world as long as possible. (Shoutout to Erin Connor for making 2010 seem nostalgic to me. In real life, I spent 2010 raising an infant, a toddler, and a kindergartener, while having an appendectomy as well as a cholecystectomy. Let’s just say that 2010 is NOT the year I remember most fondly.)

Sloane has a five-year plan for her career, and she’s ticked off step 1, an internship, and is now working as a freelance music writer for the Alternative Press. Her mentor, Robb, has tasked Sloane with taking over the Artists to Watch column, hence Sloane’s attendance at the Battle of the Bands (Dax is there as the mentor for one of the bands). Not long after Sloane and Dax run into each other, Sloane’s boss at AP gets a call from Final Revelations’ manager offering the band’s first interview in eight years … to Sloane. There’s a lot of workplace intrigue, and even a sort of corporate espionage subplot, all of which adds another layer to the underlying conflict that Sloane fully believes she has to choose between love and career and can’t have both. She recognizes the interview as the opportunity to make her name as a journalist, but also sees that it has the potential to brand her forever as someone who slept her way to success. I appreciate that there are no easy answers here as Sloane tries to find her voice and navigate this situation with her integrity intact.

The chemistry between Sloane and Dax is off the charts, but what I really love are the layers beyond simple attraction. Each of them comes from a close-knit family, yet they are each continuing to work through childhood trauma. They each also have an incredible circle of friends/found family, both in the form of bands: Dax with Final Revelations, and Sloane with Post Humorous, whose members are her best friends since childhood. In a book with a rockstar MMC, you expect music to play a central role, and it does, but not exactly in the way I would have expected — much of the action takes place as the band is recording a new album rather than touring. Rather than being rising stars, Final Revelations are at the end of their journey together, and the love and history and support between the members is woven throughout every page.

Still Into You is written in first person from Sloane’s perspective, and I know some people have incredibly strong opinions about that, but I think it works here to capture Sloane’s conflict, uncertainty, and growth. Sloane is demisexual, and we are privy to her discovery of just how that impacts her life and shapes not just her relationship with Dax but her relationships with her friends and family members. Trust takes center stage, and as a reader, I felt like I was growing to trust Dax just as Sloane was.

I read Connor’s debut, Unromance, last year and really liked it. Still Into You is even better, and I cannot wait to see what comes next. I know it’s still really early, but this one might be a contender for a top spot in 2026.

Find Still Into You at your fave retailer.