A Satchel of Richards

• Author: Lee Taylor
• Genre: Romance
• Publication Date: January 20, 2026 
• Publisher: Periwink Press, LLC

Thank you to NetGalley and Periwink Press for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Novelist Bridget Stanton’s life needs a massive rewrite. Between the mortgage on her first home, a perfect if teensy beach cottage, and the cost of feeding her horse-sized dog, she’ll never be able to quit her day job. Until it quits her.

Suspended for teaching the suddenly and inequably banned A Wrinkle in Time, her childhood favorite, she is desperate for a book advance. So she throws herself at the mercy, literally, of her brand new, witty, suave, unflappably charming agent, who has reluctantly inherited her.

His advice: skip the Lit Fic and write steamy romance instead. Has he met her? Actually, no. But Bridget knows nothing about passionate sex. Ever ready with advice, he proposes a research—she needs to get herself a satchel of Richards.

Enter Josh, a wildly successful romance cover model with Hollywood screenwriting dreams. His vivid descriptions have helped numerous authors navigate their spiciest scenes, but Bridget, it seems, needs a more hands-on approach.

As their “research” heats up, she offers him credit on the book—a big break that could help launch his wished-for career. But her publisher balks. The God of Abs cannot share the byline.

Now, Bridget must do it their way and save her way of life or risk it all for a real-life love story.

A Satchel of Richards is your must-have accessory for spring!

To be honest, when I got an email offering me access to this book, the title alone was enough to make me laugh and download it. It took me a second to get the joke in the title (IYKYK) but that happens to be one of my favorite expressions to use, and I often figure out ways to sanitize the phrase, so I can definitely make use of ‘a satchel of Richards.’ Fortunately, I also loved the idea of the story and the characters, and was curious to see how everything unfolded.

Although it hasn’t been featured in the news lately, Florida is a state that has actively worked to ban and censor books, so when Bridget leads her class in a reading of her favorite childhood book A Wrinkle in Time, it lands her in hot water. She gets suspended, and has to reevaluate her life—with two LitFic novels that aren’t selling and a mortgage on her tiny beachfront home that she can’t pay without her teaching job, she is forced to find a new means of earning money to pay for her house and enough food for her ginormous dog.

I really liked Bridget’s character for the majority of the book, and I adored Josh from start to finish—he’s basically the perfect guy. Bridget is pushed to consider writing spicy romance by her new agent, but the problem is that she is inexperienced and doesn’t know enough to convincingly write romance. Her life is about as spicy as Wonder Bread, and the closest she’s come to dating lately is fantasizing about the very attractive guy who jogs past her house daily. Her agent has suggested she get some real life practice and translate that into a spicy romance. 

This leads into a whirlwind of entwined lust and cooperative writing sessions between Bridget and what seems to be the perfect man. I fell in love with Josh faster than Bridget did, although my feelings about her fluctuated a bit throughout the reading. Initially, readers are treated to the three-ring-circus that goes on inside her mind and it is a bit endearing although revelatory in some ways. Despite her life falling apart around her, she still manages to be a lot on the judgy side and doesn’t appear to have learned the cliche about people in glass houses. She isn’t even quiet about it—she says the quiet part out loud in such an awkward way almost every time that I felt secondhand cringe.

One thing about Bridget that I did love was her way with words, when she wasn’t veering off into a farce of unbalanced humor during her early interactions with Josh. It was easy to see how her abrasive and judgmental words and behavior are hurtful, and it frustrated me to watch her hurt people who haven’t done anything to her. I’ve been in situations where I get tongue-tied, but luckily I can keep my own stream of consciousness in my head the majority of the time I’m in those situations. It was when she said overly critical things right to a person that I had the hardest time connecting with Bridget, since I have worked as a therapist and put a lot of attention and work into what I’m saying and ensuring that it isn’t hurtful even if I fall short sometimes.

Josh, on the other hand, was as close to the perfect man as I’ve ever found. He’s physically attractive (read: basically Adonis), he’s well-educated and highly intelligent, hard-working, caring, and sweet, and in the true test of the ‘good-ness’ of a male love interest, he even picks up his grandmother and her friends on Sundays to attend church. Yet somehow, Bridget isn’t able to think of him in any other terms than how he looks and the number of abs he has for far too long. She further objectifies a man who has spent his entire life being judged based on his appearance, which made it really hard to be fully on her side. However, she isn’t all bad. She turns out to be sweet and caring, and she makes one hell of a grand gesture during the story, plus she is incredibly devoted and caring towards Sally Girl, her horse-sized Irish Wolfhound. I firmly believe that how people treat animals says a lot about them, and that someone who loves and appreciates their canine companion as much as Bridget obviously does can’t be all bad, right?

The romance that develops between these two is off the charts spicy. It leaps off the page and I enjoyed how they both explore their physical relationship and how they feel towards it. However, this story falls on the safe and overdone romance trope of miscommunication, and I don’t understand the excessive reaction that Bridget has. Her behavior smacked of what I’d have expected to see out of her young students, and it makes it hard to believe that she is a real grown-up. 

Something I rarely bring up in ARC reviews is editing, because many books go through a final proofread/edit/copyedit process before publication, but this book was absolutely riddled with errors and formatting issues that should have been caught before now. Josh might have been named something else in previous drafts, because multiple characters in radically unrelated settings call him by the same nickname (“T”) that has no relation to any part of his name. Chapters are told from the perspective of both Bridget and Josh, but initially we only get Bridget chapters, and it was confusing when they switched it up. There’s an increasing number of chapters towards the end of the book where the narrator changes mid-paragraph. Naturally, this was always a jarring experience, taking me immediately out of the story and back a paragraph to figure out what the heck happened and when the narrators switched. This occurred in a lot of the chapters, and it was hard to differentiate between their voices, which sounded too much alike to me. 

Overall, I enjoyed the majority of what I read in this story, with the exception of a few things I didn’t like about a character or plot point. It wasn’t until I sat down and organized my thoughts after finishing the book that I started to notice the things that I didn’t like, and they impacted my star rating. Having a hard time telling between different character voices and struggling to identify when a narrator switch occurred had a negative impact on my star rating, as did the aspects of Bridget’s behavior that I had listed above. At first I was drawn to her quirky, unusual thoughts and chaotic life, though eventually her overly critical nature of only others but also herself, which appears in the guise of her mother’s voice, made it hard to stay connected to her. Ultimately, I found myself reading for Josh, who read as the main character for me. By this, I mean that it was his chapters I found myself looking forward to, and even finding myself outraged on his behalf, and angry at his love interest. Typically, I gravitate towards the identified MC who is nearly always female in the romance I’ve read, but in this case, the love interest and his outcome far outweighed that of the FMC. However, going into the reading with some of these critiques at the forefront of your mind might make this a higher- or lower-rated read than I did.

Bottom Line: A fun read despite its flaws, and pretty good for a debut. I’d read another of her books any day.

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