When first beginning this book I understood it to be loosely inspired by Hozier, in the sense that this is an Irish Musician who has a love affair with a member of his band, someone who was invited to sing along side him while on tour. However I think in so many ways this book just did not hit the mark.
- this feels like hozier fan fiction, but if hozier was a little dirtier than her outwardly portrays himself to be.
- if this book is based on hozier, he as an individual cares very much about the history of Ireland and for the author not to mention a key personality trait of this person they are trying to create a fictional story about, feels like they didn’t do the necessary research beforehand.
- the writing of this novel felt incredibly juvenile
- the age gap didn’t necessarily bother me but I don’t believe it was done well. Creating two characters with years between them and at two drastically different places in life. They didn’t have very meaningful conversations and I believe that to be a factor.

AHHHH ok listen!!! am i a big fan of rockstar romances? no. BUT I AM A BIG FAN OF KATE GOLDEN ROCKSTAR ROMANCES🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️

i am so happy to say i enjoyed this book way more than i anticipated to simply because this subgenre isn’t typically my jam BUT i absolutely adore kate’s other books so i knew if anyone could get me to enjoy my time reading one it was her!!!

while i admit i don’t know anything about hozier other than a few songs (and that he’s ragingly hot after making this edit, wtf??) so i fear i probably missed a lot of cute little nods to him. i fell in love with tom SO fast, he was so swoony and romantic that it made me want to actually run to see what the hype was surrounding the real version 🤭

i freaking LOVED clem, she felt so real and relatable. she did annoy the heck out of me from time to time (bc i am her, lbr) she was witty as hell and had me cackling out loud often, i absolutely loved the way she loved her people.

i really enjoyed the dynamic between these two, tom was never afraid of calling clem out on her bolter bs and he did so with the utmost love and respect. their love felt so intense yet so soft at the same time which idk if that makes sense but to me it does. the emotional depth between the two of them was *chefs kiss*. they were fun and flirty but also real and raw!!!

the found family we get to see between clem and her new band mates (most of them anyway) was EVERYTHING. it was honestly refreshing to see women just getting along and not having to compete and pit eachother against one another. i loved every tour bus moment, or when the girls would help clem get ready. it was just so fun 🥹

if you are a fan of DJ&T6, a star is born, fleetwood mac (minus the toxicity of these first three things), and obviously hozier then this book is quite literally for you!!! i can’t recommend it enough 🥰

Listen, if Kate Golden writes it, I’m going to read it! But watching her branch into a new genre and absolutely smashing it was something special. To be able to write something so different, in such a way that showcases everything we love about her writing style, is truly an example of how much she has mastered her craft.

It was so fun to go on this tour with Clementine and Halloran. I found Clem deeply relatable, which is something that always draws me in deeper when reading a romance. Halloran is the perfect quiet, introverted rockstar who meshed so well with our FMC. I felt like these two brought the best out in each other.

Please put this one on your radar! I can’t wait till this one hits shelves so more people can have as much fun as I did reading it.

Pick this one up if you like:

-Rockstar romances
-Hozier vibes
-Irish accents
-Slow burn romances with spicy happy endings
-Growth and coming into your own
-Romance on the road

This was surprisingly cozy and low angst for a rockstar romance and i'm not mad about that. I loved the chronic illness rep we got and how both of our MC's were healing in their own ways. The lyrics were such a great touch and the epilogue was lovely. It just felt like a soft, cozy hug and a cup of Barry's tea!

Thank you so much to Berkley Publishing Group for my ARC!

3.75/5

Look. Is this book written well? Yes. Is the story compelling and sweet? Also yes. But does it cross a creep line I'm not super comfortable with? ... yes.

I specifically requested this book to give it a real chance. I don't want to literally judge a book by it's cover/topic (although props to this artist, it is very beautiful.) However, after reading the entire book and seriously attempting not to be biased, I have to say this feels invasive. I am a fan of the person this is based on and have been for a long time. I specifically do not know a lot about his personal life because he is notoriously private and it feels unfair to know things he hasn't readily shared. This book clearly takes pieces of this person's life, personality, and art and uses it in a way not approved by them. Can I understand day dreaming of meeting someone you admire? Of course. But to create an entire novel of fan-fiction based on a person who is intentionally out of the public eye... well, I'm just not sure I can stomach it.

So, this writer is good. Could be great, even. But this is ignorant at best, insulting at worst.

I was super excited to get this arc, as I LOVE this author.

Unfortunately this one fell pretty flat for me for a few reasons.

1) I felt like the majority of the book was just Clem being obsessed with Halloran and it was described in great detail. I wanted more than that I guess? I was bored throughout most
Of those scenes and felt like she was just a fangirl most of the time. I didn’t love that feeling.
2) I loved Halloran’s character, and the way he saw the world. But Clem annoyed me for most of it. She acted like she’s never lived before. I mean, at one point she didn’t know what an hor dourves was? I was confused by her lack of knowledge at parts.
3) I haven’t kept up with Hozier much before this book. But reading it and knowing it was inspired by him made me look him up and research. When I did I started to get the ick…. It seems more than “inspired” by him? And that felt really fanfic to me? It made it feel awkward the more I learned about him, and how deeply it felt the same as Halloran.

Anyway, I think if I could have gotten over those few things I would have loved it. It has good romance and spice. These things might just be a me issue.

Thank you to @netgalley and @berkey for the opportunity to arc read (this was one of my most anticipated 2025 reads)

In this story, we follow 𝐂𝐥𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐞 𝐂𝐥𝐚𝐫𝐤, a deeply relatable FMC, as she swaps her serving job for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity as a backup singer. She meets 𝐇𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐨𝐫𝐚𝐧, an introverted rockstar whose soul is as deep as his lyrics. When the two come face to face, the stars start to sing.

I struggled to put this down once I began. I should have tracked the amount of times it made me audibly giggle, chuckle, or feel a sting of tears behind my eyes.

Kate is a master of slow burn romance with yearning!

𝐈𝐟 𝐍𝐨𝐭 𝐅𝐨𝐫 𝐌𝐲 𝐁𝐚𝐛𝐲 includes super fun elements like:

🎤Flirty texts
🎸Drunken confessions
🎤Lyrical love
🎸A thoughtful and self aware mmc
🎤Chronic illness rep (in a family member)
🎸Soul searching
🎤Age gap

Secure your copy and let the love anthem begin! This is a story you don’t want to miss out on.

If I could give this book more stars than 5, I would. Not only is it a love letter to Hozier fans, but to the women of the world who have spent their lives waiting for the other shoe to drop and never truly believing it when something good happens to them. Brilliant.

What a lovely rom-com! Clementine (and that is the perfect name for the female main character) is a young woman struggling to help her mom deal with a chronic illness, when she's given the opportunity to be a back up singer for a red hot Irish rock star. Romantic shenanigans ensue, of course, but Clementine has a pretty strong wall built up around her, having watched her mom fall in and out of love all the time. She knows the pain, and doesn't think it's worth the joys.

The angst is a bit high with this one, which is my only complaint. Tom (the male main character) is simply lovely and I found myself wanting to snuggle him.

Recommended for anyone who likes music based romances.

I LOVED THIS BOOK!
I am such a sucker for band romances so this was right up my alley. I loved the tropes used and the way everything was written, it was just all great. I will say the accent lingo was a bit much sometimes, I know it was done to make it obvious but could do with a little less.

4.5 ⭐

5⭐ for my enjoyment and how much fun I had
4⭐ for writing and story
= 4.5⭐ overall

I am a HUGE Hozier fan so this was particularly fun. I felt like it was enough similarities and easter eggs so if you're a fan youll catch on- but not too much that I couldn't separate Halloran from Hozier.

I had SO MIUCH FUN. I finished it in ONE sitting. Been waiting for thissssss booook!!!

I'll tell you what I didn't care for was Clementine, she felt very immature and frustrated unnecessarily me at times. I also didn't care for the unnecessary conflict in this book it felt like conflict for conflicts sake. Also if this wasn't so heavily inspired by Hozier I'm not sure I would have enjoyed it all that much.

Avoidantly attached theatre girlies rejoice!

Let's pretend for a moment that this is just a regular degular rockstar romance with NO intentional resemblance to any real life musicians. With that in mind: I had a lot of fun with this one! The characters were well
-written, the tension was top-notch; and I particularly loved how the FMC's relationships outside of the romance were fleshed out.

Who I'd recommend this to:
⁃ once again, avoidantly attached theatre girlies
⁃ Hozier fans (maybe? more on that later)
⁃ anyone who loves Ali Hazelwood (lots of "big tall man, short petite girl" here, which I generally don't mind but I know is hit or miss for others)
⁃ anyone looking to fulfill the very specific fantasy of being plucked from obscurity to live their best Almost Famous life

(Minor) critiques:
⁃ Sometimes the literal writing down of the accent was a bit much, but I think that's a personal preference.
⁃ (mild spoiler!) our characters go to see a Broadway show...and then 5 years later we're told about the existence of a revival of that same show. The implication being that they saw this show, and then it immediately closed and even more immediately was revived? It just made me chuckle ahaha

That out of the way...can we talk about the RPF of it all?

It is so interesting to me that we live in an era where it's common to tradpub not just fanfic, but Real Person Fic (TFP). Anna Todd's After was causing controversy barely 5 years ago; now, though, in the post-Love-Hypothesis-landscape (tbf I know that started off as Reylo fic, and not Adam Driver fic in particular), we've reached the point where publishers are not only sanctioning it, but leaning in hard themselves in terms of marketing, etc. I mean—look at that cover! It's pretty obvious who you're meant to imagine.

I don't think there's a perfect answer to the ethics in play. It's already fairly common for people to fan-cast or "face claim" certain public figures, imagining them as fictional characters as they read specific books. Additionally, so much of celebrity is about branding; a celeb and their team working to distill down that celeb's whole self into a marketable character, and encouraging fans to develop varying degrees of parasocial attachment. In this way, RPF seems like an inevitable next step. The celeb and their team create a character, and fandom does what it always will.

That said, celebrities are people, too. Behind each character is a (closely or distantly related) human being, and I don't think it's fair to say that musicians, by virtue to their celebrity, must be okay with becoming the subject of intense, and even explicit, fantasizing and theorizing about their personal lives.

In the end, I don't have a solution to this. I don't particularly like getting parasocial about musicians I like; they make good music, and I don't need to know anything about them outside of that 🫡 no judgement to people who navigate fandom differently, that's just what works for me! So I could only reconcile all of the aforementioned complicated feelings by pretending that this book was *not* RPF; and, I gotta said, through that lens, I enjoyed it immensely.

Thank you to the publisher and the author for providing an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

I LOVED THIS TO PIECES!!! I get really nervous when reading "muscian" romances or anything resembling real people... and to be honest, yea, this was realllllly similar to Hozier (like could most definitely be confused with fanfiction), but I LOVED IT ALL THE SAME!! I started this one afternoon and could not stop thinking about it until 24 hours later when I finished. I really just had a great time with this book and so much fun following this little fictional band around on their tour. THAT"S MY FAMILY!
And! This had a surprising amount of depth that I really wasn't expecting but loved so much!! Tom and Clementine's connection was palpable from the start and I have butterflies just thinking about their relationship arc!! And circling back to the band!! I also really loved watching Clementine find her people and grow closer to (most of) the band and build super meaningful relationships with them... tears were shed I am not ashamed to admit it!!
While I was getting a little nervous during the "third act" I should've trusted the process because WOAH!!!! I LOVED IT!!!! The ending felt so perfect for them and I could not have loved it more!!
Such a great great story! My first from Kate Golden and definitely not my last!

I wasn't even halfway into If Not for My Baby when it catapulted itself into my "Best Romance Book Ever" spot. This book is everything. It's literal perfection. It's exactly what I need and want in my romance. I'll attempt (but likely fail) to do it justice in my review.

The story is told from the perspective of Clementine, a small-town, love-adverse waitress who spends her days working at the Happy Tortilla and her nights caring for her disabled mom. When the offer of a lifetime—going on tour as a backup singer for THE TOM HALLORAN, Irish mega-star and lyrical genius—lands in her lap, Clem knows this is her opportunity to earn enough money to get her mom the treatment she needs. But after meeting the quiet, brilliant, enigmatic Halloran, and hearing him perform, Clementine's investment in this tour shifts from one of financial opportunity to something more profound than she ever imagined.

If Not for My Baby is a stunning, passionate, lyrical, soul-stirring contemporary romance. Golden's writing is magnificent. It's evident she took her time writing this, as if every word was painstakingly chosen with the utmost care and intention. Her prose is lush, sensual, moody, melodic... chock full of passion and feeling and MUSIC. Her use of language, with metaphor after glorious metaphor, sets If Not for My Baby apart. The writing itself is as beautiful as the story the words are telling. It's literary. She's a literary genius.

I usually prefer dual perspectives, but Tom's perspective wasn't necessary here. We get to know him through Clementine's eyes and through their interactions. Thanks to Golden's skill, we see him exactly as he is, and I never missed his perspective because his character was as integral to the story as Clem's.

At its core, If Not for My Baby is a love story, but it's also more than that. It's a story of a young woman's journey of coming into herself—coming to KNOW herself—separate from the small-town life she's always known. It's a story of spreading wings and souring, and finding a once-in-a-lifetime kind of love. It's a story of friendship and family, of music and life on tour, and so much more!

I could go on and on, but I'll stop here. This book is a dream, and I am SO grateful to Kate Golden and Berkley for the opportunity to read it early. 💕

My only criticism: It gave me the worst book hangover of my life, and nothing I've read since compares 😭 Did Kate Golden ruin reading for me?!

I couldn’t stop reading this book and kicking my feet! Kate Golden’s first contemporary romance is most certainly one of my new favorite reads.

Following Clementine, recently hired as a backup singer for Halloran, an Irish folk rock singer, we see what it’s like to tour with a band and fall in love despite a lifelong assumption that love never lasts.

The heart of this book is a 10! Kate the vibes you have given us with this book nothing short of perfection! We are so excited to share this book with our customers! The chemistry and dynamic the characters have was utter perfection! My Rockstar romance dreams come true TOM was a dream! This book will be our shelves and we can not wait for people to discover it!

4 solid stars

« I’m gutted and I’m free and I’m in the kind of love I spent my entire life hiding from. I’m sailing through the air with no parachute and the wind in my ears sounds like a harmony. I wish I could tell if I’ m falling to my death or flying with wings I never knew I had. »

Thank you Kate Golden for providing this copy! As usual, it has no influence on my review.

If Not For My Baby is what you could call a rockstar romance or maybe more a Folkstar Romance because Tom Halloran’s lyrics looked more folk than rock to me with their poetic quality!

This is the story of Clementine who will get to live one of her wildest dreams for a few weeks: sing for one of the most famous singers of the time: Tom Halloran. And what if Tom is charming and magnetic? Clementine is not about to have her heart crushed, she is too cynical for that, right?

Some things you should know about Clementine:
-she has a close relationship with her mom. She has cared for her for years as she is suffering from fibromyalgia.
-she let abandoned her dreams of attending a performing school to stay close and help her mom.
But when an opportunity arises to sing for a celebrity the pay is too good to pass especially as it could mean her mother undergoing a clinical trial.
Off she goes and join Tom Halloran on tour, bonding with the band members one game at a time, discovering the US one city after another. Performing in front of thousands of people is exhilarating.

Tom Halloran has a dreamy physique: very tall, long brown curly hair and beard that makes him look like a modern Jesus. Even being THE singer to follow, he also is humble, considerate, loyal and gentle. Pair it with poetic lyrics and a voice out of this world and of course Clementine was a goner!

But for someone whose dad left her, whose mom has had her heart crushed time and again, who has never seen a healthy and lasting relationship, her view on romantic relationships is very cynical.
If something has to happen between these two, she is the biggest enemy to fight.

This was an extremely bingeable romance. Full of warm feelings, found family and sexy scenes! Kate Golden’s prose is beautiful as ever and Tom Halloran will make you drool and hope that Clementine will finally have a shot at happiness.

PS Please not that my quote is from an uncorrected proof!

I LOVED THIS BOOK SO MUCH i’m still putting into words how I feel and will go all in on my bookstagram, @samreadsbooks_, about this book but this was one STELLAR rockstar romance and I am OBSESSED!!! I love anything Kate writes and this takes the cake for one of the best romances I’ve read this year.

THANK YOU SO MUCH to Kate and the Berkley team for giving me the chance to read an ARC of this book; I can’t wait to have the physical copy in my hands and on my shelf!!

I thoroughly enjoyed this steamy rockstar romance! I loved the witty banter between Clem and Tom and the emotional journey they went on together, both opening each other up and in ways they didn’t know they needed. Reading about a music tour was also really cool! Some of my favorite parts of the book were the moments of the band hanging out and getting to know each other. There were definitely some pieces of the plot that didn’t make much sense (Clem’s friend giving up going on tour with Holleran and thousands of dollars for one gig opening for her favorite artist). I also wished that Clem had stood up for herself a little more when it comes to a seedy character in the band. Overall I would give this a 3.5 and it made me want to read more by this author!

This is from a new to me author and I really enjoyed it a lot! I flew through it in less than a day because the writing was just so palatable. Nothing sexier than an Irish rocker!