Go Around Review — Is It Worth Reading?

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Verdict: An emotionally exact sapphic second-chance romance with a Goldie Award behind it and a stalker plot around it, held back by spending most of its length inside one house.

Best for: Readers who want the real anatomy of a breakup — two adults talking through what went wrong — and who can accept the air-marshal-and-actress premise as a frame rather than the main event.

Heat level: ★★★★☆ (4/5 — explicit open door)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (4.1/5 — a 4.29 Goodreads average across 2,418 ratings, ninth of seventeen titles in Noyes’s own catalogue)

Tropes: Second chance, exes to lovers, celebrity romance, forced proximity, protector and protected, closeted love interest, cohabitation, single first-person POV, stalker suspense.

Go Around by E.J. Noyes is a standalone sapphic second-chance romance published by Bella Books in November 2021, a contemporary story with a suspense frame, in which Federal Air Marshal Avery Weston — fifteen months into almost being over her ex — is assigned to a flight seated beside Elise Hayes, the award-winning actress who left her rather than be publicly out, and then has to take her in when a fan starts making threats.

It carries a 4.29 average across 2,418 Goodreads ratings, a 2022 Golden Crown Literary Society Goldie Award and a Lambda Literary Award shortlisting. What is unusual is how little the reviews disagree: almost everyone praises the same things, and those who hold back hold back for the same reason — a structural choice its most devoted fans are loudest about. Worth understanding before you start.

What Is Go Around About?

Go Around is a contemporary sapphic romance with a romantic suspense shell — and the proportions matter. The threat is real and bookends the novel, but the middle is a two-hander about reconciliation conducted mostly in a living room. The title is cockpit vocabulary: a go-around is what a pilot does when an approach is unsafe, breaking off to try again. Noyes means it as a thesis, and the book is far more interested in the second approach than the emergency that forced it.

Avery is defined by what she has not managed to put down. She has the job, the house, the dog, the competence — and none of it closed the wound Elise left when she ended five years without a real explanation. Elise arrives assuming the door is shut and finds it is not, which is worse for both of them. The book runs on first person, Avery’s POV alone: you get her hurt in full and Elise only through what Avery will let herself see. That narrowing buys real intimacy and costs the book something, and readers notice both.

What Makes This Sapphic Second-Chance Romantic Suspense Work

• The breakup gets taken seriously: The most-praised element by a distance. Reviewers note that the reconciliation is worked for rather than waved through — Goodreads reviewer Lex Kent puts it as “none of this ‘oh I’m mad but I forgive you after 5 minutes'”.
• Two adults who actually talk: Readers name the communication between Avery and Elise more often than the chemistry, which is rare in a second-chance romance and is why this one lands.
• Bennett the dog: Avery’s Rottweiler mix draws affection across every rating band, including from a one-star reviewer who named him the book’s only redeeming feature.
• The heat: Banded 4/5 “explicit open door” by romance.io, and reviewers describe the scenes as frequent and emotionally loaded rather than decorative.
• A complete standalone: No series, no cliffhanger, no homework — with one affectionate callback to Noyes’s Alone that repeat readers keep singling out.

Book Synopsis

Avery Weston flies for a living without ever being a passenger. As a Federal Air Marshal she boards anonymously and spends the flight watching a cabin of people who have no idea she is there. It suits a woman who has become very good at not being seen — which is what she has been doing for fifteen months, since Elise Hayes packed up five years of a shared life and left, because a rising television actress could not afford to be photographed with a girlfriend.

Then the seat assignment comes through and Elise is in it. The conversation Avery has spent a year not having is suddenly unavoidable at thirty thousand feet, and it does not stay a conversation: somewhere over the country, a man who has been watching Elise decides to stop watching. Avery does her job. The plane lands. And a badly shaken Elise turns up on the doorstep of the house she used to live in, asking to stay until the police work out how serious the threat is.

Avery says yes, because the alternative is worse and because nobody outside a small circle knows Elise Hayes ever had a girlfriend, which makes that house the safest room in Los Angeles. What she has agreed to is weeks of proximity with the person who did the most damage to her, and a dog who was always more Elise’s than anyone admitted. The apologies come. So does the pull neither of them ever switched off. Whether the reason Elise left has changed — and whether Avery can afford to find out — is the question the rest of the book is about.

My Review

The emotional bookkeeping here is excellent, and it is why the book won what it won. A lot of second-chance romance treats the breakup as a plot device to be forgiven on schedule. Noyes treats it as an injury with a healing time and is honest about how long that time is. Avery does not stop being angry because the story needs her to; she stops in stages, some of them ugly, and Elise has to keep showing up for it.

The prose is not the problem and never is with Noyes — several reviewers who marked the book down still call her one of the best writers in the genre. The dialogue does the heavy lifting: the leads talk, at length, about specific things, and the book trusts you to find that interesting. It is right to. Bennett the dog works as a pressure valve exactly when the conversation needs one.

Where it struggles is a choice rather than a failure, and it is what the reviews converge on. This is a book about a Federal Air Marshal and an award-winning actress that takes place almost entirely in a house. One Goodreads reviewer put roughly 70% of it in what she called a “hum drum cocoon”; Lex Kent, at 4.25 stars, wished Noyes had mixed things up — a trip to the set, something. Noyes’s signature is exhaustively researched settings, and here she has two of the most cinematic professions in sapphic romance and uses neither. It is defensible in-story, since Elise is hiding, but the cost is real.

The related complaint is plausibility, and it lands where the suspense does. Both the in-flight incident and the climax strain for readers who know the procedure — one two-star reviewer with a law-enforcement eye said flatly she couldn’t suspend her disbelief; a three-star reviewer could not accept that a stalked woman and her armed girlfriend would take so few precautions. Jude in the Stars, at four stars, made the point gently: the antagonist’s storyline is thin.

One expectation to reset. The cover is an airliner on final approach and the title is a cockpit term. Neither describes the reading experience. This is a domestic reconciliation novel with a threat at either end. If you came for an aviation thriller, recalibrate; if you came for two people working out whether what broke them is fixable, you are in the right place.

My honest note: A four-and-a-half-star relationship novel in a three-star thriller’s jacket. If you read second chance for the reckoning rather than the reunion, this is among the best in the subgenre — but the premise never quite gets cashed in.

Element	In Go Around
Central relationship	Avery Weston & Elise Hayes — Federal Air Marshal and award-winning actress, exes reunited fifteen months on
Core tropes	Second chance, exes to lovers, celebrity romance, forced proximity, closeted love interest, cohabitation
Setting	Los Angeles, largely inside Avery’s house — the home she and Elise once shared
Heat level	4/5 — explicit open door
Series	Standalone — complete arc and an HEA, with one callback to Noyes’s Alone
Content notes	Gun violence, death and violence (graphic on StoryGraph); homophobia and stalking (moderate); alcoholism, suicide, injury detail (minor); explicit sexual content

How Spicy Is Go Around?

A 4/5. romance.io bands the steam level “explicit open door” — one step below its top band — and readers corroborate that the scenes are on the page, recur through the middle, and do emotional work rather than punctuate it. Because these two have five years of history, the sex functions as a plot event: the first scene is repeatedly singled out as the moment the stakes become legible.

No reviewer I found flags specific kink content beyond conventional explicit heat, and none raises a consent question about the arrangement that puts Elise in Avery’s house. If this band is what you want, Rewind It Back and Midnight Rain sit in the same romance.io band.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you want forgiveness earned in instalments, you like romance built out of long honest conversations, you want explicit heat that carries plot weight, and a very good dog improves any book for you.

You may want to skip it if: you were sold on the air-marshal-and-actress premise and need it cashed in, you want the suspense to be the point rather than the bookends, you need both leads’ interiority, or a thriller beat that would not survive contact with procedure pulls you out.

In short: superb on the relationship, deliberately small on everything around it — and whether that reads as focus or waste is the whole call.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)

There is no viral moment here and there was never going to be one. My searches turned up no BookTok footprint at all, which is unsurprising for Bella Books: discovery in the lesfic press runs through awards, blog reviewers and a publisher’s backlist, not TikTok. What it has instead is the award record — the 2022 Goldie for Contemporary Romance: Long, a Goldie shortlisting for the Ann Bannon Popular Choice Award, and a Lambda Literary Award finalist slot alongside Jae’s Chemistry Lessons, Haley Cass’s In the Long Run and Milena McKay’s The Headmistress. Blog coverage is warm — four stars from Jude in the Stars, five from LezReviewBooks — but trade coverage is entirely absent, with no Publishers Weekly, Kirkus or Library Journal, and Amazon’s editorial block carrying a NetGalley reader quote rather than an outlet. My Reddit reads were rate-limited and incomplete; what finished surfaced scattered r/LesbianBookClub mentions rather than recommendation threads.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The breakup, first and most consistently. Reviewers keep reaching for the word “mature”, and the recurring formulation is that this is what a second chance is supposed to be. Then the chemistry, which nobody disputes. Then Bennett, named by five-star and one-star reviewers alike, who several say steals the book. Abby Craden’s narration has its own following. And one pleasure keeps surfacing: the callback to Noyes’s earlier Alone, which repeat readers single out — including a one-star reviewer who said it was the only part worth reading.

What readers argue about and complain about: The setting, above everything. Several independent reviewers make the same observation — a novel about an air marshal and a television star spends the bulk of its pages in one house — and frame it as a departure from an author known for researched, textured worlds. Second: plausibility, raised by readers with procedural instincts about the in-flight incident and the final confrontation. Third: predictability, of the reconciliation and of the closeted-celebrity conflict, which one two-star reviewer called a worn-out cliché. Below that, a smaller thread on the single POV, since Elise drives every decision that matters and is never narrated. That is where the genuine split sits: some readers forgave her early, one held a grudge most of the book and got there, one did not finish because she never could. Where you land on Elise largely determines your rating.

The standalone question worth asking first: Go Around resolves, delivers an HEA, and requires nothing before or after it. Which makes the real question where you go next in a catalogue of twenty works averaging 4.32 across nearly 36,000 Goodreads ratings. Its 4.29 places it ninth, mid-table, just under that career average. The Ask, Tell quartet is where her readership lives: If I Don’t Ask is the highest-rated thing she has written at 4.59, Ask Me Again sits at 4.46, and Ask, Tell is her most-read at 4.35 across 5,464 ratings. That series is the answer — not the aviation-titled Turbulence, which despite the obvious pairing is her lowest-rated major title at 4.19.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does Go Around end on a cliffhanger?

No. It is a complete standalone with a happily-ever-after for Avery and Elise, and no sequel to continue into.

How spicy is Go Around?

A 4/5. romance.io bands it “explicit open door,” one step below its top band. The scenes are on the page and recur, and readers describe them as central to the emotional arc.

Is Go Around part of a series?

No — it is a standalone. It contains a callback to Noyes’s earlier novel Alone that repeat readers enjoy, but you lose nothing by reading it on its own.

Is there an audiobook of Go Around?

Yes — narrated by Abby Craden for Audible Studios, running 8 hours and 38 minutes. The narration is widely praised, and several readers recommend it as the better way into the book.

Did Go Around win any awards?

Yes. It won the 2022 Golden Crown Literary Society Goldie Award for Contemporary Romance: Long, was a Goldie finalist for the Ann Bannon Popular Choice Award, and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist in Lesbian Romance.

Is Go Around the best E.J. Noyes book to start with?

Probably not. Its 4.29 Goodreads average sits ninth of seventeen rated titles in her catalogue, under her 4.32 career average. Readers rate all four Ask, Tell books higher, topping out at 4.59.

If You Loved Go Around, Read These Next

The closest match on this site is The Runway Affair, which runs the same engine — reunited exes forced together with a crime plot pressing on them — but gives its setting far more room. For a colder, sharper take on a woman guarding a public career, The Headmistress stood beside Go Around on the same 2022 Lambda ballot. And if it was the earned-forgiveness structure you responded to rather than the suspense, Rewind It Back works the same reckoning at the same heat level. For more, browse our second chance lesbian romance reading list or the full Book Reviews collection.

The Bottom Line

Go Around is much better at its centre than at its edges. The reconciliation is patient, specific and genuinely adult, the dialogue carries real weight, the heat is well judged, and Bennett is a small triumph. It also wastes two extraordinary professions on a living room, leans on a suspense plot that will not survive a procedural reader’s scrutiny, and narrows to one POV when the other woman is making all the decisions. The award juries went with the centre and I mostly agree — but go in for the breakup, not the badge. Check Go Around on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, Go Around ranks as an award-winning mid-catalogue Bella Books second-chance romance — emotionally exact and beautifully narrated, hemmed in by its single setting, and best approached for the reckoning rather than the threat that forced it.

The Evidence Scorecard

Overall ★★★★☆ 4.1/5

• ✓ 4.29 average across 2,418 Goodreads ratings
• ✓ 2022 Goldie winner, Lambda finalist
• ✓ StoryGraph runs lower at 4.11
• ✓ Ninth of seventeen in her own catalogue

Romance ★★★★☆ 4.4/5

• ✓ Forgiveness earned in instalments
• ✓ Mature communication is the headline praise
• ✓ Five years of history gives the chemistry weight
• ✓ Reconciliation lands where readers expect

Characters ★★★★☆ 4/5

• ✓ 93% of StoryGraph readers found them loveable
• ✓ 82% report strong character development
• ✓ Bennett the dog praised across every rating band
• ✓ Elise never narrated despite driving the conflict

Writing ★★★★☆ 4.3/5

• ✓ Prose criticised by nobody
• ✓ Dialogue carries the whole middle
• ✓ Critics still call her genre-best
• ✓ Signature researched setting is missing

Emotional Impact ★★★★☆ 4.4/5

• ✓ 88% of StoryGraph readers tagged it emotional
• ✓ The breakup is treated as an injury
• ✓ Anger resolves on a real timeline
• ✓ Stalker threat carries less weight

Heat Level ★★★★☆ 4/5

• ✓ romance.io bands it explicit open door
• ✓ On the page and recurring
• ✓ First scene singled out repeatedly
• ✓ One band below the genre ceiling

Ending ★★★★☆ 3.8/5

• ✓ Complete standalone, no cliffhanger
• ✓ HEA earned over the full arc
• ✓ Blog reviewer found the resolution underpowered
• ✓ Final confrontation strains plausibility

Re-read Value ★★★★☆ 4/5

• ✓ Readers report noticing new detail on returns
• ✓ Craden’s 8h38m audio is a strong second pass
• ✓ The Alone callback rewards catalogue readers
• ✓ Four Ask, Tell books outrank it for repeat reads

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