I’ll Stand By You is a short novella that finishes Karen's '80s-set Boston Classics series and starts her latest '90s-set series, Carolina Classics. It takes place in a North Carolinian beach town and centers around five friends working at a resort together during the wedding of Henry and Bella (from the final Boston Classics novel) in 1991.
The five friends are in a post-college transition period, trying to figure out what to do with their lives and how their lifelong friendships will survive. We've got Violet, the bossy leader; Dani, the empathetic ear; Sully, the laid-back surfer; Ford, the all-American hero; and Whitney, the baby of the group, caught up in a love triangle between Sully and Ford.
This story is less of a romance and more about the relationship between all five of them, but it's doing the work in setting up the protagonists of the future series, which will be set around a Dawson’s Creek-esque show in their hometown, five years into the future, well into the '90s.
As in all her books, Karen brings the emotion as well as the nostalgia for the '80s and '90s. Read this to get ready for some '90s feels! It's available everywhere now!