Hairpin Curves Review: Is It Worth Reading?

Updated on October 5, 2026

Verdict: A warm, surprisingly explicit winter road trip that reunites two estranged best friends, held back by a slow first half and a central conflict that one honest conversation would have settled.

Best for: Readers who want a low-angst, sex-positive sapphic road trip with real heat, and who can wait until the halfway mark for the romance to properly start.

Heat level: ★★★★☆ (4/5 on romance.io — explicit, open door)

Rating: ★★★☆☆ (3.4/5 — a 3.59 Goodreads average across 1,205 ratings, with more than a third of readers parked at three stars)

Tropes: Friends-to-lovers, second chance, road trip, forced proximity, snowed in, secret longtime crush, wedding plus-one, homebody meets adventurer, bisexual heroine, low angst.

Hairpin Curves by Elia Winters is a standalone contemporary lesbian romance published by Carina Adores, Harlequin’s LGBTQ+ romance line, in July 2020 — a friends-to-lovers road trip from Florida to Quebec in February, in which a woman who has never left her home state accepts a ride from the ex-best friend she stopped speaking to years ago, without knowing that the ex-best friend has been in love with her the whole time.

It holds a 3.59 average across 1,205 Goodreads ratings, a positive Publishers Weekly review, and a Devra Woodward audiobook that listeners keep recommending. The interesting number, though, is the shape underneath the average: 35% of Goodreads ratings sit at exactly three stars. Readers rarely hate this book. A large share of them simply finish it unmoved, and both the people who love it and the people who shrug are worth hearing before you start.

What Is Hairpin Curves About?

Hairpin Curves is a contemporary sapphic romance built on two tropes that usually pull in opposite directions. A road trip means motion, new places and a story that moves; a snowed-in finale means stillness and nowhere to hide. Winters uses the first to rebuild a broken friendship and the second to force the confession. It is a low-angst book by design. There is no villain, no external threat beyond the weather, and no third party. Everything that stands between the two leads is history and silence.

Megan Harris is twenty-five, cautious and stuck. She has big ideas about seeing the world and has never once crossed the Florida state line. Scarlett Andrews is her opposite: restless, impulsive, and the friend Megan cut out of her life years earlier over a rupture neither of them has ever properly discussed. Scarlett also carries a secret that the reader learns early and Megan does not — she has had feelings for Megan since they were teenagers, and she treats the trip as a chance to finally get over them. That gap in knowledge is the book’s engine.

What Makes This Sapphic Road Trip Romance Work

The road trip itself: The most consistently praised element in the reviews. Readers enjoy the stops, the games and the rest-stop dares, and several say the long hours alone in a car are what make the slow rebuild of the friendship believable.
Heat that arrives as a surprise: Reader after reader uses some version of “surprisingly steamy.” The book’s cover and tone read sweet, and the open-door scenes are considerably more explicit than that packaging suggests.
Sex positivity and bisexual representation: Reviewers single out the frank, shame-free way the leads talk about desire, including the casual inclusion of sex toys, and several praise the bisexual representation as respectful and unforced.
A second chance at a friendship, not just a romance: Readers who love it describe it as a story about two people in their mid-twenties working out who they became after they stopped talking, and the character growth is what they remember.
Low angst with an honest ending: There is no dark moment engineered by a stranger, and the happy ending includes an epilogue set two years later. Readers looking for a gentle forced proximity book name this as the point.

Book Synopsis

Megan Harris has spent twenty-five years in Florida, talking about travel and never doing it, so when an invitation arrives for a wedding in Quebec in the middle of February, it feels like both an opportunity and a dare. She has no one to go with and no plan for getting there.

Scarlett Andrews offers to fix both problems. She will be Megan’s plus-one, and instead of flying they will drive the whole way north, turning a weekend obligation into the trip Megan has always claimed she wanted. The catch is that the two of them have barely spoken in years. Their friendship ended badly, and neither has ever said out loud what went wrong. Megan agrees anyway, warily. Scarlett has her own reasons for wanting the time together: she has been quietly in love with Megan for most of her life, and she has decided that a week of close quarters will either cure her of it or let her settle for friendship.

The car turns out to be a poor place to keep a secret. Road-trip games become confessions, dares turn into something closer to flirting, and the old ease between them comes back faster than either expected. Then a winter storm closes the road and strands them together, with the wedding still ahead and no more miles to hide behind. Scarlett has to decide whether to tell the truth, and Megan has to decide whether she wants to hear it.

My Review

The premise is good, and the best of the book is very good. A road trip is a natural forced-proximity machine, and Winters understands that the interesting part is not the destination but the hours in between. Two people who used to know each other completely relearning each other at sixty miles an hour is a lovely engine for a friends-to-lovers story, and the moments where Megan and Scarlett slip back into old jokes are the moments the book comes alive.

The second real strength is the heat, and specifically its tone. Winters has a long backlist of erotic romance, and it shows in the confidence of the intimate scenes: they are explicit, playful and entirely free of shame, and they treat pleasure as something two adults can discuss with a straight face. For a book marketed as fun and flirty, that frankness is a genuine point of difference, and it is the thing readers who rate it highly mention first.

Where it struggles is momentum, and this is not one reader’s complaint — it is the most repeated criticism in the reviews. The first third is spent on prickly, guarded interaction, and multiple reviewers say the romance does not really begin until around the halfway mark. That leaves the relationship less room than the setup promises, and the wedding and its aftermath feel rushed as a result. Around that sit a conflict one honest conversation could resolve, leads who read younger than twenty-five, and small plausibility slips — Publishers Weekly, otherwise positive, notes musical tastes that do not fit women of their age.

One expectation to reset: the destination. The book is sold on Quebec, and readers note that very little of it actually happens in Canada. This is a car book and a cabin book, not a travelogue. If the scenery is what drew you, calibrate; if you came for two people trapped together, that is exactly what you get.

My honest note: A warm, sexy, low-stakes book that takes too long to start and ends too soon after it gets going. If a slow first half and a conversation-shaped conflict frustrate you, you will feel every mile. If you want a gentle road trip with real heat, it is a pleasant drive.

Element	In Hairpin Curves
Central relationship	Megan Harris & Scarlett Andrews — estranged childhood best friends, homebody and adventurer, friends-to-lovers
Core tropes	Friends-to-lovers, second chance, road trip, forced proximity, snowed in, secret longtime crush
Setting	A February drive from Florida to a wedding in Quebec, ending in a snowstorm
Heat level	4/5 — explicit, open door
Series	Standalone — HEA with an epilogue set two years later
Content notes	Explicit sexual content including sex toys, one scene a reader flags as having a consent question, a painful friendship breakup in the backstory, winter driving in a storm

How Spicy Is Hairpin Curves?

A 4/5, which matches romance.io’s steam rating (explicit, open door). The scenes are open door and explicit, and readers repeatedly describe the heat as a surprise — one Goodreads reviewer calls it among the hottest she has read, others settle for “surprisingly steamy.” The first half is mostly tension, but once the leads stop resisting the scenes are frequent enough to be a feature rather than a garnish. Readers specifically mention mutual masturbation and toys, and the tone throughout is playful rather than intense.

The one element worth flagging in advance is a scene involving mutual masturbation that a StoryGraph reviewer describes as somewhat coercive. That is one voice, not a theme, and no other reviewer I found raises it, but it is worth knowing. Beyond that, nothing is flagged as dark or kink-heavy. For the same heat in a similar second-chance shape, Count Your Lucky Stars and Delilah Green Doesn’t Care both sit at a high-heat level.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: road trips and stuck-together stories are your favourite setup, you want explicit, sex-positive heat inside a low-angst book, you like friendships that have to be rebuilt before anything else can happen, and bisexual representation matters to you.

You may want to skip it if: a slow first half tests your patience, conflicts that one conversation would fix drive you up the wall, you want leads who read like grown adults from the first chapter, or you are picking it up for the Quebec setting.

In short: a warm, steamy road trip that rewards patience more than it rewards urgency. If you like this shape, our low-angst lesbian romance list is the next stop.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (October 2026)

There is no current wave behind this book. It is a 2020 release, I found no organic BookTok activity attached to it, no Reddit recommendation thread surfaced in my searches, and the editorial coverage is a single Publishers Weekly review from the launch year, which liked it. What it has instead is staying power on lists. The publisher’s copy carries a PopSugar best-romance-of-2020 mention, it remains Winters’ most-rated book on Goodreads by a wide margin, and it keeps turning up on sapphic road-trip and forced-proximity roundups. The audiobook is the other steady route in: Harlequin Audio released it alongside the print edition in July 2020, narrated by Devra Woodward and running just under eight hours, and a good share of the warmest reviews come from listeners.

Prefer audio? Listen to Hairpin Curves on Libro.fm — the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The road trip, first and most consistently — readers enjoy the stops, the games and the sense of two people with nothing to do but talk. Then the heat, which is named again and again with the same word attached: “surprisingly.” Bisexual representation draws specific praise from several reviewers, as does the sex positivity. Readers who rate it four stars or higher talk about character growth, about two women in their twenties figuring out who they are, and about a friendship repaired with care. Woodward’s narration has its own fans, with more than one reviewer calling the audiobook excellent — though one StoryGraph listener abandoned it at 40% because she could not tell the two leads apart by voice, so sample before you commit.

What readers argue about and complain about: Pacing, above everything. The first half is slow, the hostile phase runs long, and multiple reviewers say the romance does not really begin until around the midpoint. The conflict is the second theme: several readers say the central problem could be solved with one conversation, and it is the trope objection that comes up most often in the low-star reviews. Third, the characters — a recurring note that Megan and Scarlett act younger than their age, with a smaller group calling them cookie-cutter at the start. Fourth, the ending: several readers wanted more after the wedding and found the final stretch rushed. Beyond that, scattered plausibility complaints about money and winter driving. Opinions divide on the miscommunication. At least one reader argues it is believable because the rupture happened when the two were eighteen, and the low-angst readers count the absence of melodrama as the whole appeal.

The standalone question worth asking first: Hairpin Curves is complete in one volume, with a happy ending and an epilogue, and needs nothing before or after it. If you want more from Winters, set expectations: most of her backlist is erotic and polyamorous romance, her newest release, The Roommate Subtext, is a male/female romance, and none of her other books has drawn anything like this one’s readership on Goodreads. This is the one to start with, and for many sapphic readers it will be the only one.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Hairpin Curves a standalone?

Yes. It is a complete standalone romance published by Carina Adores, with a happy ending and an epilogue set two years later. You do not need to read anything else by Elia Winters first.

How spicy is Hairpin Curves?

A 4/5. The intimate scenes are open door and explicit, and readers often describe the heat as surprisingly steamy for a book with such a light, sweet tone.

Does Hairpin Curves have a happy ending?

Yes. Megan and Scarlett get a happily-ever-after, and an epilogue set two years later confirms it. Some readers wished the post-wedding section had been longer, but the ending is not in doubt.

Is Hairpin Curves enemies-to-lovers?

Not really. It is marketed as frenemies-to-lovers, but readers mostly experience it as friends-to-lovers with a second-chance edge: two former best friends rebuilding a friendship that ended badly, with a longtime secret crush on one side.

Is there an audiobook of Hairpin Curves?

Yes. Harlequin Audio published it in July 2020, narrated by Devra Woodward and running just under eight hours. Most listeners praise the narration, though one reviewer found the two leads hard to tell apart.

If You Loved Hairpin Curves, Read These Next

If the road trip is the draw, The Road Trip Agreement puts two van-life vloggers on the Oregon coast in a sunnier, lower-heat fake-dating version of the same journey. If it was the second chance with a friend you lost, Count Your Lucky Stars runs the same reunited-best-friends engine at the same heat, and draws the same complaint about a conflict built on one unasked question. And for a wedding that drags a reluctant heroine back into an old orbit, Delilah Green Doesn’t Care trades the highway for a small town with more bite.

For more in this register, browse our friends-to-lovers lesbian romance list, the wider contemporary lesbian romance guide, or the full Book Reviews collection.

The Bottom Line

Hairpin Curves wants to be a feel-good road trip about two people finding their way back to each other, and much of the time it is. The car is a great pressure chamber, the heat is frank and genuinely steamy, and the friendship at its centre feels lived in once it gets going. It is also slow to start, built on a conflict that one conversation would have ended, and short of room for the romance it spends half the book setting up. Whether that trade works depends on your patience: the reader who wants a gentle, sex-positive sapphic road trip and does not mind waiting for it will have a good time. Check Hairpin Curves on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, Hairpin Curves ranks as a pleasant mid-tier sapphic road-trip romance — warm, frank and genuinely steamy, held back by pacing and a thin conflict, and best approached for the drive and the heat rather than the drama.