Quick Take
- Narration: Abby Craden is a near-perfect fit for Avery Weston, capturing the character’s dry competence and suppressed emotional life with a consistency that holds across eight-plus hours.
- Themes: Second-chance romance, the gap between professional control and personal vulnerability, the cost of keeping secrets
- Mood: Warm and low-key tense, built on character chemistry rather than melodrama
- Verdict: A satisfying second-chance lesbian romance that works as well as it does because both leads are genuinely interesting people.
I was halfway through my morning commute on a Tuesday when Avery Weston, federal air marshal and a woman who has spent fifteen months almost getting over her ex, found herself seated next to that ex on a commercial flight. I know the setup sounds familiar. Second-chance romance is one of the oldest structures in the genre. But E.J. Noyes has a gift for making situations that should feel contrived feel instead like inevitabilities, and Go Around is one of her cleaner examples of that gift at work.
Avery is doing fine. That is how the book opens, and Noyes means it with exactly the irony you suspect. Avery is competent, professional, physically capable in ways that matter given her job, and emotionally guarded in ways that have more to do with Elise Hayes, award-winning actress and current television it-girl, than with anything Avery would admit. Fifteen months of deliberate recovery have gotten her most of the way there. Then Elise sits down in the adjacent seat, and everything resets in an instant. It is a testament to Noyes’s skill that this moment, despite being telegraphed from the first page, still lands.
The Architecture of Forced Proximity
The structural intelligence of Go Around is in the complication that arrives after the initial reunion. Noyes does not simply rely on proximity to do the work. An overzealous fan threatening Elise gives Avery a professional reason to involve herself, and when Elise needs a place to stay while the stalker situation resolves, the logic of the arrangement is tight enough that it does not feel engineered for convenience. What the situation creates is sustained proximity, and what sustained proximity creates, when you are still kind of in love with your ex and the mutual spark is as strong as ever, is exactly the problem the novel is actually interested in.
Abby Craden narrates entirely from Avery’s point of view, and the casting is right in ways that are easy to take for granted until you imagine a different voice in the role. Craden captures the specific quality of a woman who has learned to lead with competence and follow with feeling, the dry humor that comes from professional authority and the vulnerability that surfaces only when she stops being able to manage it. One reviewer praised how Noyes handled the psychology of both characters, getting equal weight for Elise’s struggle despite the single point of view, and Craden’s performance is a significant reason that balance works.
Predictability and Why It Does Not Matter Here
Several readers have described the stalker subplot as secondary compared to the romantic central plot, and structurally they are right. But Noyes uses it more cannily than pure plot machinery. The external threat gives both Avery and Elise a reason to maintain proximity that neither of them would grant themselves purely for emotional reasons. It puts Avery in situations where her professional identity and her personal history cannot be kept separate. The sequences where she is functioning simultaneously as a protective detail and as a woman trying not to feel everything she is clearly feeling are the book’s best passages.
One reviewer called the book predictable, and technically yes, the genre destination is visible from a considerable distance. But predictability in romance is only a problem when the journey offers nothing. Here the journey is the point. Noyes writes emotional interiority with precision, and Craden delivers it without sentimentality. You know where Avery and Elise are going. Getting there is still the experience you came for, and the book earns the landing it promises.
Noyes’s Character Construction and What Makes It Work
E.J. Noyes is recognized within the lesbian romance genre as a writer who builds protagonists with genuine interior lives rather than assembling them from genre conventions. Avery Weston fits that pattern. She is not defined by her sexuality or her heartbreak or her job, though all three are present and important. She is defined by the specific way those things coexist in her, by how her professional discipline has become a coping mechanism, and by how Elise’s return makes that mechanism visible in ways Avery finds uncomfortable. That level of character construction is rarer than it should be in this genre, and Craden’s narration does it full justice.
Readers Who Will Find This Rewarding
Go Around is a strong choice for readers of lesbian romance, particularly those who prefer emotional intelligence over operatic intensity. Fans of E.J. Noyes’s earlier work will find this consistent with her best, and listeners new to the genre will find it an accessible and engaging entry point. The airport and flight settings add a specific texture that makes it slightly more interesting structurally than the standard forced-proximity scenario. This free audiobook is available through membership platforms and represents one of the stronger entries in the genre available without additional purchase. Listeners who need substantial external plot action, or who find the second-chance romance setup frustrating by definition, may not get what they came for, but for everyone else, eight and a half hours of Abby Craden voicing Avery Weston is time well spent. Noyes’s pacing is also worth noting. She does not rush the reconciliation and she does not artificially delay it. The relationship between Avery and Elise moves at the speed that its emotional logic requires, which is neither the breakneck pace of airport paperback romance nor the glacial slowness of literary fiction that has lost confidence in its own plot. That calibration is part of what makes Go Around work as a listening experience across eight-plus hours. You are always in the right place in the story, and Craden’s narration keeps that sense of orientation intact even through the more emotionally complicated passages.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Go Around work as a standalone or is prior E.J. Noyes reading required?
It is fully standalone. No familiarity with Noyes’s other books is needed to understand or enjoy Go Around, and the romance between Avery and Elise is self-contained within this novel.
How explicit is the romantic content in Go Around?
The book is a romance with moderate heat. There are intimate scenes, but the focus is primarily on emotional dynamics and character development rather than explicit content. It is appropriate for adult listeners who prefer character-driven romance.
Does the stalker subplot feel realistic given that Avery is a federal air marshal?
Noyes handles the professional elements credibly enough that the setup does not strain believability. Avery’s instincts and training are integrated into how she responds to the threat, which makes the subplot feel motivated rather than arbitrary.
Is Abby Craden’s narration a good fit for a first-person female protagonist in this genre?
Craden is an excellent fit here. She captures Avery’s dry competence and emotional guardedness with real precision, and her handling of the scenes where Avery’s professional and personal lives collide is particularly strong. She is one of the stronger narrators working in this genre.
