🎧 Reviewed by LD | Rating: 3.6/5 | Steam: 🔥
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t read Hello Sunshine yet — go read it first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
The Opening
Sunshine MacKenzie has the kind of life that looks flawless from the outside — millions of followers, a cooking show, bestselling cookbooks, a gorgeous Manhattan apartment, a devoted husband. Then her 35th birthday rolls around and an anonymous hacker calling themselves “Aintnosunshine” blows the whole thing up.
The Fall
The hacker doesn’t just leak data, they systematically dismantle Sunshine’s entire brand. The truth comes out piece by piece: she changed her name, fabricated her whole backstory, and — the real gut punch — she can’t actually cook. Her entire culinary empire was built by a team of producers behind the scenes. She’s been living a manufactured lie this whole time.
The backlash is instant and brutal. Within days she loses the show, the book deals, the sponsors, her savings, her apartment. Her marriage to Danny collapses under the weight of it, and he leaves her. She’s left with nothing.
Back to Montauk
Broke and with nowhere else to go, Sunshine retreats to her childhood home in Montauk, which means facing her estranged sister Rain — grounded, practical, and openly skeptical of the superficial world Sunshine chose instead of her own family. Living in her sister’s shadow forces Sunshine to actually confront who she’s become without any filters or edits to hide behind.
She starts spending real time with her young niece, who just sees her as an aunt rather than a disgraced internet personality, and lands a low-level kitchen job working under Chef Z — a brilliant, notoriously volatile chef in the Gordon Ramsay mold. For the first time in her life, Sunshine has to actually learn how a kitchen works with no charm or lighting tricks to fall back on. Alongside all of this, she starts developing something with a local fisherman named Ethan, and slowly begins to understand the gap between performing a life online and actually living one.
The Mystery and the Reveal
Throughout all of this, Sunshine is determined to figure out who ruined her life — chasing down who knew her secrets and who stood to benefit from her public downfall. The twist, when it finally lands, is that it was Danny all along. Her own husband. He bought out the apartment and orchestrated the whole thing, and his stated reasoning is that he wanted her to actually see the monster she’d become.
And then there’s the final reveal: she’s pregnant, and it’s his.
Here’s where I land on this book, honestly: Sunshine was a genuinely shitty person for a long time, manipulative and self-obsessed and willing to build an entire empire on lies. But Danny matched that energy completely. Whatever his reasoning was, orchestrating his own wife’s total public destruction is an equally shitty thing to do, and the book never fully clarifies what he was actually going for. Was this purely about humbling her?
Did some part of him hope they’d find their way back to each other once she’d been stripped down to nothing? I genuinely don’t know, and I don’t think the book wants me to know either.
The Open Ending
The book never resolves whether Sunshine and Danny get back together. It’s left completely open. By the end, Sunshine has grown — not just from the brutal grind of actually working a real job, but from rebuilding her relationship with her sister and niece and finally being present in their lives in a way she never was before. She doesn’t get her old life back, and by the final page, she doesn’t seem to want it.
The Steam Rating Breakdown
🔥 — Barely any heat here. This isn’t a romance-driven book, and the Ethan storyline stays mostly in the background rather than becoming the central focus.
The Ending — Satisfied or Disappointed?
Mixed. I appreciated that it wasn’t wrapped up in a neat bow — Sunshine genuinely doesn’t know what happens next, and that uncertainty feels true to where her life actually is. That said, I can’t say I’d forgive Danny for what he did, regardless of his reasoning, which makes the open door for reconciliation a little hard to sit with.
Would I Reread It?
No.
The Hot Take
I’m not sure Danny ever gets to be the sympathetic one here. Sunshine was awful, but secretly orchestrating your spouse’s total public and financial destruction isn’t a redemption arc for him either — it’s just a different flavor of the same problem.
Who Is This For
If you want a character study about identity and online performance more than a traditional romance, and you’re okay with an ending that doesn’t tie everything up neatly — this delivers. If you need your leads to be likeable or your endings resolved, this might frustrate you.
Where to Get This Book
📖 Physical Book
Amazon.ca | Amazon.com | Bookshop.org
📱 Ebook
Amazon Kindle .ca | Amazon Kindle .com
🎧 Audiobook
Audible Canada | Audible US | Libro.fm
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Plot Twisted. 🔥
🎧 | Genre: Women’s Fiction, Contemporary | Steam: 🔥 | Narrator: Joy Osmanski