After hearing wonderful things about Genevieve’s debut Adelaide, I was really excited to receive a copy of Lina and June and experience her writing myself!

Lina and June’s friendship shouldn’t make sense, they’re complete opposites. After a messy university night out throws the girls together, it seems like nothing can tear them apart. Until June’s health takes an unexpected turn and Lina jets off to Paris, leaving her best friend behind. As their once-intertwined lives veer off on separate paths, they’re on their own to figure out how to fix their severed bond.

What a beautiful exploration of female friendship, the deep soulmate love you can hold and the devastating heartbreak it can cause. I think this book will feel incredibly relatable for many, I could definitely see slices of my friendships throughout their different seasons of life.

Genevieve’s writing is beautiful, reading this has desperately made me want to pick up Adelaide. I devoured the whole book in one sitting. Every word was chosen with such care and emotion and it had me so immersed and absorbed.

As with most character driven stories, the plot can be lighter, with this feeling like a journey through the years, but I never felt bored. I loved the time jumps and the years in Paris and New York and I felt like I was growing up alongside them both.

I was especially captured by June (and also can we take a moment for wonderful Oli 🥺 what a redemption ARC!!) I regularly found myself frustrated by Lina and her messiness - she was often selfish, with the friendship feeling unbalanced and June offering all of the support, but I could see the growth in her towards the end and how she was able to balance them out.

This felt very real and raw - it’s a deep dive into love, friendship and loss, and was a wonderful reminder of the different kinds of love we can experience in a lifetime, and how our friends can be our first soulmates.

Thank you Head of Zeus and Genevieve Wheeler for the gifted ARC copy - Lina and June publishes December 10th.

There’s nothing worse than a friendship breakup, especially if you thought this person would be in your life forever.

Lina and June are total opposites. June is sensible, puts everyone before herself, and happy to be the side character in her friends story. Lina is outgoing, impulsive, and doesn’t worry about consequences of her actions. These two came into each others life unexpectedly and one Halloween night and never left again. Until life got complicated.

Wheeler has a great talent of writing nuanced characters. I adored both Lina and June but when I think about some of Linas traits I wonder how would I react if I was June? And yet I can’t help having that soft spot in my heart for her. These characters are messy, confusing at times, filled with emotion, but above all you can tell how much they genuinely love each other.

When Lina and June meet by chance at a frat party one Halloween, neither knows that the friendship that blossoms will become the most significant relationship of both their lives. Free-spirited, outgoing Lina lives only in the present, responding to each experience as it happens, while conscientious, steadfast June approaches life with caution, weighing up each opportunity that comes her way in order to make the choice that makes most sense in the long-run. The two should have little in common, yet they cultivate a bond they are sure can weather any obstacle, until June gets sick just as Lina receives the opportunity of a lifetime.

Author Genevieve Wheeler's debut novel, Adelaide, chronicled a relationship the reader is told from the start is doomed, and here too, she opens with the two protagonists estranged, having not spoken for seventeen months, before taking us back to the girls' chance meeting at a college frat party and ensuing all-consuming friendship. Just as with Adelaide's ill-fated romantic relationship, we must look for the fault lines that will eventually tear the two friends apart as we wonder whether they will ever be able to reconcile.

Wheeler does an excellent job of establishing Lina and June as distinct characters by showing rather than telling. The dynamic of their friendship is set up early on when June cares for Lina after she collapses at a frat party - the first but not the last time she will swoop in to rescue her friend from disaster - and Wheeler suggests the inequality between them in various clever ways: June's love language is stability while Lina's is flamboyant gestures (cooking coq au vin and filling June's dorm room with sunflowers in February); when they take road trips, June is the driver, Lina the crafter of various whimsically titled playlists.

Their relationship feels like a realistic depiction of the kind of bonds girls form at college to replace distant high school friends; their friendship is rooted in sharing new experiences and in exploring an unfamiliar place for the first time together. It is then perhaps inevitable that it is threatened by deviations from their established routines - a boyfriend, a semester abroad, graduation.

It is often hard to root for Lina, who is almost thirty when June gets sick but still flitting through life much as she did in her early twenties, heedless of the consequences of her behaviour. Lina is the architect of her own struggles, whereas June has been struck down by plain bad luck, despite trying hard to do everything right her whole life. There are certainly shades of the 2002 Mandy Moore tear-jerker 'A Walk to Remember' in their dynamic in the latter part of the story - June must suffer so that Lina can grow as a person, learning to become less selfish and more self-reliant. Will Lina be able to step up to support June in the way she needs?

Whereas Adelaide tackled themes of mental illness, the focus here is on June's poor physical health, and the effect this has on both her and Lina individually and on their relationship. Wheeler tackles June's reaction to her diagnosis with candour and depth, exploring how her feelings encompass anger, grief, envy and optimism, and I appreciated how her response was not a straightforward linear one. Wheeler also touches on how June's illness, and her handling of it, affects those who are around her every day, their interactions with her showing how much has changed but also how June's stoic nature endures.

Also poignant are Wheeler's depictions of family relationships, through the non-judgemental, unwavering, unconditional love that June's parents and Lina's mother show their respective only children. Romantic relationships complement the main narrative, but the boyfriends are minor players next to the big love story between June and Lina. Theirs is a powerful reminder that platonic relationships can be just as tumultuous and just as life-affirming as romantic ones.

Thank you to Aria & Aries for giving me the opportunity to read and review an ARC of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I absolutely loved Lina & June. This is one of those books that made me stop and think about my own friendships and the people who have shaped who I am.

What I loved most is that this book treats female friendship as a love story in its own right. Lina and June’s relationship is messy, complicated and deeply loving which that’s what made it feel so real. There’s something so honest about loving someone deeply while also realizing that people change, grow and sometimes grow in different directions.

This book made me laugh, hurt and absolutely broke my heart in places. It’s bittersweet in the best way. Highly recommend this read!

Lina and June is a beautiful, emotional story about friendship, growing up, and the people who become such an important part of our lives that imagining a future without them feels impossible.

Lina and June meet at university and, despite being complete opposites in so many ways, quickly become inseparable. June is organised, plans everything and knows exactly where she wants her life to go, while Lina lives much more in the moment, with huge dreams and an impulsive approach to life. I absolutely loved watching their friendship develop and seeing how perfectly they seemed to balance one another.

There were so many moments throughout this book that made me smile. Their friendship felt warm, messy and completely believable, capturing those relationships where someone becomes more than a friend, they become family.

But this is also a story about what happens when life doesn’t follow the plans we’ve made. When June’s health deteriorates, their friendship is tested by illness, distance, difficult decisions and all the things left unsaid.

I loved both of these characters and became completely invested in their relationship. At its heart, this felt like a love story, not romantic love, but the deep, life-changing love that can exist between two friends.

And that ending… oh, my heart.

Beautiful, heartbreaking and full of so much love. An easy five stars from me.

Thank you to head of Zeus and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This one felt very relatable for me because I think most of us have experienced changing friendships at some point in our lives. You can have a friendship that feels like it will last forever, but then life happens. People change, priorities change, circumstances change and sometimes you simply find yourselves heading in completely different directions.

That’s what I really liked about Lina and June. Their friendship wasn’t perfect, and I could understand both sides of it. There were moments where I felt frustrated with them, but also moments where I completely understood why they were struggling to find their way back to each other.

Emotional, honest and beautifully written, this is so much more than a story about two best friends. It’s about growing up, changing and accepting that not every friendship stays the same forever. Lina and June is definitely one I think people will see a little bit of themselves in.

Such a beautiful read! I immediately fell in love with our main characters as we watch them grow and develop through their friendship. June and Lina are so easy to fall in love with and I really enjoyed seeing their dynamic progress throughout the book.

I loved the writing; some of the descriptions we get throughout the book are amazing! I did however struggle with the lack of quotation marks for dialogue - a stylistic choice that I did get more used to throughout the book but that I still struggled with nonetheless.

Overall I would highly recommend!

I have been a huge fan of Genevieve's ever since I read Adelaide, so I was so excited when I was invited to read Lina & June, and boy, it did not disappoint!

"You were my first great love story, you know. That doesn’t change."

As a woman in her late 30's I really connected with both of the FMCs. Relationships, particularly friendships, can be hard to maintain as life gets busy, and this book reminded me of just how important they are. The laughter and tears you share, the secrets and dreams. I absolutely believe a friend can also be your soul mate in life, and this book captures that beautifully.

I again, loved the writing, which had an almost poetic feel about it in parts, and I highlighted so many quotes that resonated with me.

Lina and June is a love story. A heartbreaking, yet powerful tale of two women who may at times find themselves adrift from each other, but will always find their way back home.

All the stars with tears in my eyes. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Lina & June are best friends, brought together in a bit of a sliding doors moment in college and sustaining a strong bond into adulthood. The novel uses dual timelines to outline the development of their friendship whilst slowly unpacking the rift that is the basis for the novel.

Being a similar age to Lina and June, it was fun to read a book that is pretty timestamped in its cultural references. It gave the story a sense of familiarity and nostalgia.

Between the two I had a harder time connecting with Lina. She is a pretty flawed person with some pretty unattractive qualities, and fell into a manic/whimsy trope a little. I also didn't fully buy her character development after June’s death; it felt a bit incongruous with her decisions throughout the book and a little rushed.But I did lock in to June. She felt much more grounded (not just in her personality, which was clearly deliberate) but for me personally she felt also more multidimensional. This makes the direction of her story an absolute kick in the guts, but is also a credit to Wheeler’s writing.

For me, the highlight of Lina & June is its reflections on friendship. Beyond the more classic questions of what friendships are built upon, I found myself thinking about the role of convenience in a friendship, and at what point a friendship can become self-serving. Wheeler allows for lots of opportunity to reflect on all of these questions. I don't think she takes a particularly clear angle, which I think served the book well, as my perspective consistently shifted depending on where we were in the story.

I jumped at the chance to read Lina and June months before it’s released. Adelaide was an instant five-star read for me and after reading the blurb for LaJ I had a sneaky suspicion, it would be too! Spoiler alert: I wasn’t wrong! LaJ swept me into their vortex from the moment I hit the prologue, Genevieve Wheeler’s writing has a way of pulling you in and not letting go until the book is long finished. Even now, years later I find myself thinking about Adelaide Williams. I know that June Carmichael will join my ever growing list of fictional characters that I think about daily, who leave their mark on me as a reader and a human being.

Throughout reading the book Lina and June came across as 22 by Taylor Swift personified and I often found myself humming the tune in my head. We meet both characters at various ages/stages in their lives and I’m not the same age as either character, as a woman in her 30s I can relate to the ups and downs (read: very high highs and extremely low lows) of female friendship. For the nostalgia of being young and running around and unknown city and thinking that you’re going to be in each other’s lives forever. I loved the pop culture references sprinkled into the story. Things that you’d only know if you were there/lived through it or have spent time researching what life was like. I devoured this in one sitting, wiping away tears when I hit the acknowledgments. Despite the tears, I can’t wait to reread it on release day on audiobook. 6 stars, no notes.

Thank you so much to Aria, Aria & Aries, Genevieve Wheeler + NetGalley for the opportunity to read Lina and June before it’s published. It’s one of the best books I’ve read in 2026/ever and so easy to rate 5 stars (it would be infinite stars imho). I can’t wait for this to be out on 10th December and for the book community to give it the hype it deserves! I can’t wait to recommend it to everyone with eyes!

"But you were my first great love story, you know. That doesn't change."

Lina and June, while being totally different, became inseparable after meeting at a college's party. They stayed a pair for more than a decade, until something tragic happened and they fell apart.

Being a woman in her 20s, it's particularly touching seeing two women loving each other this much, yet having to face the inevitable step of growing up and having different priorities. It hits home just in the unique and rare way.

I didn't expect this story to make me tear up like this. It was really emotional, beautiful, and relatable on many points. This book is about friendship, love, growing up, learning and finally grieving what could have been, what could be and what will never be. Both Lina and June were touching in their own way and I really liked their characters, as flawed as they were. Their relationship was one-of-a-kind and I will think about them for a while.

Thank you to Aria & Aries for allowing me the advanced reader copy of this book on NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I really enjoyed this story about friendship, growing up, and how life can change along the way. This was my first time reading a book by this author and it was beautifully written.

Lina and June are so different, but somehow their friendship brings them together, and I loved following their journey.

It’s emotional and heartfelt, and I think it’ll really hit home for anyone who has ever experienced a friendship changing over the years.

If you like emotional friendship stories, strong female friendships, and character driven reads, this one is for you!

Thank you to NetGalley and the Aria & Aries team for the ARC.

I absolutely adored Adelaide, so I was delighted to have the chance to read Lina and June early!

Lina and June tells the story of two young women who meet at college, and at first, are polar opposites. Lina is your typical college student - a bit messy, chaotic, but full of love for those she holds close. June is strait laced, responsible and a perfectionist. They meet at a frat party when June rescues Lina from a situation, and they quickly become fast friends.

We follow the girls’ lives as they navigate college, with Lina heading off to a semester abroad in Paris, leaving June in New York. When June graduates to the real world and Lina returns from Paris starry-eyed, their friendship struggles. Until a huge, life-changing situation brings them back together. Is it too late to save their friendship?

Lina and June is everything I’ve come to expect from the brilliant Genevieve Wheeler. The way she writes young women is so raw, and real. I related to both girls - Lina’s messiness with good intentions, and June’s self-pressure.

Genevieve Wheeler is definitely now an auto-buy author for me - if you enjoyed Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors, you’ll love this one.

2026 is the year of female friendship. Alongside this year’s new movie adaptation of ‘Sense and Sensibility’ and influencer Eli Rallo’s announcement of her upcoming debut novel, ‘I Hope Eden Reads This,’ the year is finishing with another book focused on the subject.

‘Lina And June’ is Genevieve Wheeler’s sophomore novel, following her debut, ‘Adelaide.’ It tells the story of two best friends, chronicling their first meeting at NYU and the decade that follows, until we reach the present day, where they are no longer speaking. Lina is wild, impulsive and idealistic, while June is a quintessential type-A who has her whole life planned out. While they may seem like two completely different people, they complement each other perfectly. But when Lina has the opportunity to follow her dreams abroad just as June is facing an unexpected crisis, their friendship is called into question. Can the two work through it?

'Lina And June' is exactly what it sets out to be: a character study of female friendship. We’ve all experienced the highs and lows of friendship, and I found myself relating to both women at different points. You’ll race through the novel while also finding yourself holding back tears by the end. It’s a thoughtful read I’d thoroughly recommend, and it even has me going back to add Wheeler’s first novel to my reading list.