Chameleon Review — Is It Worth Reading?

Updated on October 9, 2026

Verdict: A funny, bruising, grown-up sapphic novel about a fifty-six-year-old therapist finally dealing with the woman who broke her at university, with a gentle slow burn at its centre, held back by a romance that often plays second fiddle to the past and an ending several readers found rushed.

Best for: Readers who want a character study with a love story inside it, who have been waiting for sapphic leads over fifty, and who do not mind spending as much time with the ex as with the new woman upstairs.

Heat level: ★★★☆☆ (3/5 — open door but occasional; not indexed by romance.io)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (4.2/5 — a 4.49 Goodreads average from a small, devoted readership, with the romance thinner than the packaging suggests)

Tropes: Slow burn, neighbours-to-lovers, walled-off heroine, older sapphic leads, dual timeline, toxic first love, found family, second-chance-at-life, online flirtation, cat as matchmaker.

Chameleon by Pip Landers-Letts is the second book in the Leamington Bloom series, an independently published contemporary lesbian novel set in present-day England and in the university years of the late 1980s, in which Dr Catherine Truscote — a psychotherapist who has spent three decades keeping everyone at a professional distance — collides with a warm new neighbour upstairs just as the woman who broke her heart decades ago comes back into focus.

It has a 4.49 average across 135 Goodreads ratings, a 4.55 on StoryGraph, an August 2026 audiobook narrated by Marisa Calin, and an author whose previous book, Pyg, won the 2025 Kindle Storyteller Award. The praise is close to unanimous about Catherine, and noticeably less settled about whether this is a romance at all. Both halves of that are worth understanding before you start.

What Is Chameleon About?

Chameleon is a character-driven sapphic novel with a slow-burn romance running through it — British, contemporary, and much more interested in why its heroine cannot let anyone in than in the mechanics of getting two women into bed. That means therapy-room irony, a best friend who says what nobody else will, and a long look back at falling for a woman at university in the late 1980s.

Catherine is fifty-six, successful, funny in a dry and slightly lethal way, and has never had a real relationship. What she lacks is not insight — she is a therapist, she has plenty — but the willingness to act on it. Francesca, the woman at the root of all this, treated Catherine as a secret from the very beginning. The book is told across three timelines: Catherine’s university years, the recent past before the events of Pyg, and the present. That structure lets you watch the walls go up and come down in the same novel.

What Makes This Slow-Burn Sapphic Novel Work

Catherine herself: The most consistent praise in the reviews is for the protagonist — complex, flawed, and funny. On StoryGraph 93% of reviewers say the book has strong character development and 80% call it character-driven.
Leads over fifty: Reader after reader singles out the age of the cast, the frankness about menopause, and the rarity of a lesbian-lesbian pairing in its forties and fifties.
The humour: “Funny” ties with “emotional” as StoryGraph’s top mood at 62%, and reviewers repeatedly name the British wit and the dialogue. One Amazon reviewer puts the banter in Ruby Landers territory.
The supporting cast: Penny, the ex-lover turned best friend, gets as much love as Jules does, and Juniper the cat turns up in review after review.
The timeline structure, for most readers: Revealing the Francesca years in pieces is widely credited with making Catherine make sense, and even readers who resisted it at first say it earned its place.

Book Synopsis

Dr Catherine Truscote runs a therapy practice in which everyone’s mess is examined except her own. She has a routine, a best friend in Penny, a business partner she has known since childhood, and a life arranged so that nothing reaches her. Then an incident at the office turns into a scandal, and the arrangement starts to fail.

At almost the same moment, someone moves in upstairs. Catherine has not met her — there is only a note, and a cat called Juniper who needs looking after — but the neighbour turns out to be Jules, warm and red-haired and entirely unbothered by Catherine’s defences. Meanwhile the reflective blog Catherine writes on the side is gaining followers, and one of them is flirting with her.

Running underneath it all is 1988, and the girl Catherine met at university. Francesca was the first woman she loved, and the story of what Francesca really wanted — told in chapters that move between then, a few years ago and now — is the reason Catherine has kept her door shut ever since. With the past resurfacing and Jules knocking, Catherine has to decide whether to stay safely walled in or finally risk something for herself.

My Review

Catherine Truscote is the reason to read this book, and she is a genuinely good creation. A therapist who can diagnose everyone but herself is not a new idea, but Landers-Letts writes her with a sharpness and a comic timing that keep her from becoming a case study. The jokes she uses to hold people off are the same jokes that make you like her. Readers call her complicated, messy and real, and they are right.

The second strength is the structure. Moving between the university years, the recent past and the present means you learn about Francesca the way Catherine had to — piece by piece, too late. The Lesbian Review points out that the Francesca relationship is as central as the one with Jules, and that is exactly why it works: the past explains the present.

Where it struggles is balance, and this is a pattern across independent reviewers rather than my own quibble. Several readers who loved the book say it is not really a romance — one Amazon reviewer says it has “just a smudge” of one — and the ones who came for Jules sometimes found her waiting offstage while the Francesca story took the page. Beyond that, readers name three things: Catherine repeats her younger self’s mistakes for longer than some could stand; the ending and the six-months-later epilogue felt rushed to more than one reviewer; and a few found the flashbacks and flash-forwards more confusing than illuminating.

The expectation to reset is the genre. The cover and the “slow-burn desire” pitch say romance; Amazon files the Kindle edition under lesbian and LGBTQ+ literary fiction, and that is closer to how it reads. If romance is what drew you, calibrate — the love story is real, but it is one strand of three. If you have been burned by thin, trope-driven sapphic romance, relax: this is the other thing.

My honest note: A sharp, funny, grown-up character study with a slow burn tucked inside it. If you need the romance front and centre, you will be frustrated. If you want a heroine over fifty finally choosing herself, this is one of the better ones this year.

Element	In Chameleon
Central relationship	Catherine Truscote & Jules — a walled-off psychotherapist and her warm new upstairs neighbour, slow burn
Core tropes	Slow burn, neighbours-to-lovers, older sapphic leads, dual timeline, toxic first love, found family
Setting	Present-day England and a university in the late 1980s
Heat level	3/5 — open door but occasional
Series	Leamington Bloom book 2 — a spin-off of Pyg; readable alone, better after it
Content notes	Explicit sexual content, toxic relationship and emotional manipulation, gaslighting and emotional abuse, betrayal and infidelity, grief, alcohol, schizophrenia/psychosis (minor)

How Spicy Is Chameleon?

About a 3/5. romance.io has not indexed Chameleon — it lists the author’s other two books but not this one — so the number comes from readers instead. The Lesbian Review files it under average spice and medium heat, Goodreads reviewers who rate the spice land at 3 or 3.5 out of 5, and StoryGraph readers tag the sexual content as graphic. It is open door, and one reviewer mentions sexting alongside the on-page scenes, but the sex is occasional rather than the engine of the book.

The thing worth knowing in advance is not a kink but a relationship: the Francesca thread is a study in manipulation, and StoryGraph readers flag gaslighting and emotional abuse. No reviewer I found flags anything more explicit than that. For the same medium heat with grown-up leads, When She Flies and Almost Life sit in the same band.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you want sapphic leads in their forties and fifties, you like a heroine whose wit is also her armour, you enjoy past and present timelines that explain each other, and you read for character first and romance second.

You may want to skip it if: you need the love story on every page, you get impatient with a heroine repeating her mistakes, you find jumping timelines disorienting, or you want a long, lingering ending rather than a quick epilogue.

In short: a superb heroine and a lot of heart, in a book that is more about healing than about falling in love.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (October 2026)

There is no viral moment here. Searches turned up no organic BookTok coverage and no trade reviews — no Kirkus, no Publishers Weekly. I could not check Reddit at all this month, as it was unreachable from my browser, so that is an open question rather than a finding of no footprint. What the book does have is a small, intensely loyal readership: 135 Goodreads ratings in five months, with 90% at four or five stars and only four ratings below three, plus full reviews from The Lesbian Review — tagged highly recommended and one of its reviewer’s favourites — and the Mx Phoebe’s Viewpoint blog. The engine is the author’s own momentum. Pyg won the 2025 Kindle Storyteller Award, readers arrive already invested in Catherine from that book, and the Kindle edition sits in Kindle Unlimited.

The audiobook is the other development. It arrived on 24 August 2026, narrated by Marisa Calin, who also read Pyg, and runs 8 hours 15 minutes unabridged. Calin is the single most enthusiastically praised thing in the Amazon reviews — for distinct voices, for real emotion — and more than one listener recommends taking both books on audio back to back.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): Catherine, first and by a distance — “complex” is the recurring word, closely followed by “funny.” Then the age of the cast: love over fifty, menopause, and what coming out meant in the 1980s all come up repeatedly. Penny gets almost as much affection as Jules, and Juniper the cat is a running favourite. The timeline structure earns praise from most readers for making Catherine’s walls comprehensible, and one Amazon reviewer places the angst near Milena McKay and the wit near Ruby Landers.

What readers argue about and complain about: The genre question, above everything — and notably, it comes mostly from fans. Reviewers giving four and five stars say it reads like general fiction with a romance subplot, and a three-star reviewer on Goodreads calls it more of a psychological experience than a romance. The structure is the second theme: most readers end up loving the three timelines, but one reviewer found the flashbacks and flash-forwards convoluted, another initially disliked the switching, and a blogger felt the back-and-forth sapped forward momentum. Third: Catherine’s arc. More than one reader found it frustrating that she makes the same mistakes at fifty-six that she made as a student before anything shifts. Beyond that, recurring notes that the ending and the six-months-later epilogue were rushed, that Francesca’s storyline is cut short, and that the twist is guessable.

The series question everyone should ask first: Chameleon resolves. Catherine’s story closes and readers report a happy ending with Jules, so there is no cliffhanger to worry about. The question is Pyg, which introduces Catherine as a minor character and sets up Francesca and the office fallout. The publisher says Chameleon works as a standalone and reviewers agree you can follow it, but the clear majority of readers who mention reading order say start with Pyg — itself rated 4.27 on Goodreads across about 300 ratings. The author’s website announces no third Leamington Bloom book yet. If you are going to read both, read them in order.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do you need to read Pyg before Chameleon?

No, but most readers recommend it. The publisher bills Chameleon as a spin-off that works as a standalone, and reviewers agree it can be followed cold, but Pyg sets up Francesca and the office scandal, and the majority of reviewers who mention reading order say the second book lands harder with the first behind it.

How spicy is Chameleon?

About a 3/5. The Lesbian Review files it under average spice and medium heat, Goodreads reviewers who rate the spice put it at 3 to 3.5 out of 5, and StoryGraph readers flag the sexual content as graphic. It is open door, but the sex is occasional rather than the engine of the book. romance.io has not indexed it.

Is Chameleon a romance?

Partly. The slow burn with Jules is real and ends well, but several readers, including ones who gave it five stars, say it reads more like character-driven general fiction with a romance thread than a traditional romance. Amazon files the Kindle edition under lesbian and LGBTQ+ literary fiction rather than romance.

Does Chameleon have a happy ending?

Yes. Readers report that Catherine and Jules end up together, and the book closes on a six-months-later epilogue. A few reviewers found that ending rushed and wanted more depth in the epilogue and more closure on Francesca.

Is there a Chameleon audiobook?

Yes. Marisa Calin, who also narrated Pyg, reads the unabridged edition, which runs 8 hours 15 minutes and was released on 24 August 2026. Her narration is the most praised thing about the audio, and several listeners call it a performance rather than a reading.

If You Loved Chameleon, Read These Next

If the decades-long reckoning with a first love is what hooked you, Almost Life follows two women across a lifetime with the same heat level and more literary ambition. For grown-up leads and a slow burn that takes its time, When She Flies is Lee Winter at her most adult. And if it was the angst that worked for you — the comparison readers reach for — Firewild brings Milena McKay’s version of it with far more heat. For more in this register, browse our slow-burn lesbian romance recommendations or the full Book Reviews collection.

The Bottom Line

Chameleon wants to be a novel about what an old wound costs you, and it mostly succeeds. Catherine is a great heroine, the humour keeps a heavy story light on its feet, and the three timelines make her walls make sense. It is also more character study than romance, slower to let Catherine change than some readers could bear, and quicker to wrap up than its build-up deserves. If you want a sapphic heroine over fifty and a story about healing with a love story in it, this is worth your time — ideally after Pyg. Check Chameleon on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, Chameleon ranks as a sharp, character-first indie sapphic novel — funny and emotionally honest about love after fifty, held back by a romance that shares the stage with the past, and best approached for Catherine rather than for the slow burn.