The Shippers

Author: Katherine Center Title: The Shippers Publisher: St. Martin's Press Date Published: 05/19/2026

Read Dates: 04/09/2026- 04/10/2026
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

 📖 I received a gifted e-book ARC. The following is my honest review✍🏻

The Shippers is a single POV friends-to-lovers romance. JoJo is so bad at love and relationships she’s beginning to think she’s cursed. She’s determined to use her sister’s destination cruise ship wedding to turn her luck around, and hatches a plan with her family that involves making her childhood crush and memorable first kiss, Finn, fall in love with her. But with her sister and mom caught up in wedding preparations and relationship dramas, she decides to rope her childhood best friend Cooper into being her wingman. After all, she figures he owes her for moving to London with no warning four years ago and completely ghosting her. Now she just has to get her best friend back, be there for her family and break a lifelong love curse in one week at sea!

I love Katherine Center’s storytelling, how she blends love stories in with other relationships and life issues. I absolutely adored Cooper and JoJo together, their easy banter and playfulness was so much fun to read. I liked how the story was filled with second chances for a few relationships. I was practically begging JoJo to put the puzzle pieces together, while also enjoying watching it all slowly come together. An absolute delight to read.

After a whole lifetime of being bad at love, JoJo Burton decides to solve her intimacy issues once and for all at her sister’s destination wedding on a cruise ship. With the help of a little pop psychology, she diagnoses herself with a fixation on the neighborhood guy who was her her first crush and first kiss (and who just happens to be a newly-divorced wedding guest ), and she decides to woo him during the cruise for some long-delayed closure. Only problem is, her sister’s a little busy being a bride at the moment—so JoJo ropes in her childhood bestie, Cooper Watts, to be her wing man. Cooper: who RSVPed no, but then showed up, anyway. Cooper: who left town without a word four years earlier and moved to London. Cooper: who was, if she’s honest, the worst heartbreak of JoJo’s life. It’s bliss for her to see him again, and it’s agony, too—and the more they team up for Project Conquest, the more she obsesses over questions she can’t bring herself to ask.

Shipboard antics ensue in this witty, heart-tugging, childhood-friends-to-lovers romance—as JoJo and Cooper fake flirt, slow dance, share a cabin, sing duets, treat sunburns, get jealous, rescue each other over and over, and finally, at last, figure it all out in the most blissful, swoony, romantic way.

No one does summer romance quite like Katherine Center. THE SHIPPERS will take readers on the cruise of a lifetime in a story awash with romantic longing, top-notch banter, long-held secrets . . . and true love rediscovered.