The Bookish Mindset

Overview:

Title: Sweet Heat
Author: Bolu Babalola
Published: July 2025
Genre: Romance
Themes: Second Chance, Family, Greif

One sentence summary: Picking up five years after Honey & Spice, Kiki and Malakai are forced back together in situations they couldn’t have imagined.

One sentence review: Babaola proves yet again why she is one of my favourite authors ever, a stunning book.

Review:

(Some ever so minor spoilers if you’ve not read Honey & Spice or the blurb of Sweet Heat or if you don’t like to know a thing about your romances – just pick this one up, trust me)

Sweet Heat picks up five years after Honey & Spice left us, and things have changed. Kikki and Malakai are no more. Life has happened to them and they are not the same people.

But Sweet Heat sees them being thrown back together, much to their individual dismay. Their best friends are getting married and their duties as maid of honour and best man have to rise above their history. Or does it?

This is Bablola’s third book and it is unequivocally her best yet. I adored both Love in Colour and Honey & Spice but Sweet Heat has taken the top spot. This is her best work yet, I am thoroughly addicted to her work.

This book broke me. It utterly shattered me before carefully piecing those tiny pieces of me back together tenderly. Normally I’m crying happy tears at the end of a romance when the couple are back together, and of course I did here, but I did not have me crying at multiple times before that point because of how much it HURT that these two weren’t together. It physically hurt me. And it hurt me at the prospect of them potentially not finding ways back to each other.

Romances are often criticised for their predictability, they’ll get together at the end, the tropes take all the mystery out of it etc etc, but it’s all bollocks in my eyes. You may assume how romances will end, but that journey you’re taken on by the author is the exquisite experience we crave. It’s an emotional rollercoaster and it’s beautiful.

Sweet Heat got me good and it’s going to stay with me for some time. I loved it. It was worth the wait.

If you’d like to get yourself a copy, you can support local bookshops while doing so on Bookshop.org with this link here.

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And don’t forget to check out my other blogs and reviews – you can find books with similar themes in the same folder link below, or click back onto blogs to see the whole offering.

Last updated 11/08/2025