The hype got me. Hollywood Renaissance starts with Reel. I had heard enough about Score — Verity Hill, Wright “Monk” Bellamy, the second-chance heat, the mental health — that I could not wait for the “right” order. I opened book two. It hit home in a number of ways. Reel is next. That was always the plan. I just could not sit still.
Forever put it out May 19, 448 pages. Most of it runs on the same set as Reel: a biopic of Dessi Blue, a fictional Harlem Renaissance singer. Monk writes the score. Verity writes the script. Oscar buzz before cameras. They already know each other. That is the problem, and the point.
Who they are
Verity Hill does not linger. She is a screenwriter with the kind of Hollywood résumé people wait decades for, and she has spent more than ten years treating the past like a draft she will not reopen. She is very good at not asking whether what she did to Monk Bellamy was fair. Then the industry puts them on the same picture, and the distance she built does not survive the first week.
The world knows Wright Bellamy. She still says Monk. He is a musician who puts more feeling in a cue than he will admit in a room. He signed onto the biopic for his own reasons. He did not sign up to sit across from the woman who left him wrecked at twenty-two. Ryan will not give you a villain. Verity’s leaving was not petty. It came from something she did not yet have a name for. The name comes. It changes how she reads her present, and it changes how she reads every impulsive, confusing, hurting choice she already made.
The break
Ryan does not tease the past in crumbs. She takes you all the way back. Fictional HBCU, Finley College. Verity in film and African American studies. Monk in music. They fall hard and fast. It flames out when Verity has her first major manic episode — Monk does not have the language for it yet — and a disastrous stretch that ends in a hospital, a bipolar diagnosis, and her leaving school. She does not give him the whole truth. He spends more than ten years thinking he was betrayed.
BookPage’s Carole V. Bell named the dual narration as one of the novel’s strengths: we see what Verity is going through. He does not. By the time they land on the Dessi Blue picture, she has a career and a small circle who know. The attraction did not die. They try a workplace arrangement like adults who should know better. They do not.
How she writes it
Ryan’s sentences have weight. Desire is not a paragraph of adjectives; it is a look held too long, a silence that does work, a body telling on itself. That is the right instrument for a book about a composer and a writer making a picture. The whole novel is about making something, so the prose has to feel like craft, not decoration.
What sets Score apart is that she will not skip the hard part to get back to the kiss. Verity’s mental health is not a chapter you endure so the romance can resume. Ryan stays in it. The woman on the page is brilliant, complicated, capable of a lot of love and a lot of self-protection. The people around her are drawn like people, which is how Ryan’s books usually work. Nobody is furniture.
What bipolar actually does on the page
Romance has a habit of using illness as a secret a kiss can solve. Ryan does not. Verity’s diagnosis is not a twist and it is not a quirk. It is how she understands herself — who she is, why she did what she did, and whether that knowledge is enough to build anything real on. Kirkus noted she lives at the intersection of Black, bisexual, and bipolar, and that Ryan does not underplay the hardship or strip the desire. The care is the craft.
Ryan has said Score was one of the hardest books she has written because she refused to get this wrong. She interviewed people with bipolar diagnoses, their families, their partners, their clinicians. You can feel that work. Crisis is vivid without turning Verity into a spectacle. Stability is not a montage. Medication, sleep, therapy, routines, the early tell that an episode is coming — the book treats those as the job of staying alive, not as scenery the love story has to step around. Love does not cure her. Love also does not get to flinch and still call itself love.
Monk’s half of the argument is the risk. He survived her once. He rebuilt. Loving her again means accepting that the same devastation is possible. That is not a soft second chance. The history has weight. Ryan will not let the characters, or the reader, off the hook. The question is whether he can hold the truth without running and without trying to fix her into someone easier. In this book, he stays. That is the brave part, and it is not cheap.
“That’s what I want. I want to appear as myself. I don’t want to apologize for my condition, but I will advocate for myself. I don’t want to hide, but to show up fully and authentically as myself. I’m Black. I’m queer. I have bipolar. Deal with that shit.”
The history is the job
The Harlem Renaissance is not wallpaper. Dessi Blue is invented. Ryan has said the character is an amalgamation — Billie Holiday, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith — a love letter to Black creatives who did the work and did not get the plaque. The research is in the grain. Score lets you sit in it while two people try to make a picture about love, legacy, and erasure. They are falling back in love inside that work. Making something together strips the performance. You cannot hide in the cue or the page. That is the intimacy. Second-chance heat without that spine would just be another reunion.
What it gets right
The mental health is human. Accurate without turning the book into a pamphlet. Part of Verity, not a device. The second chance has consequences; nobody gets a clean slate because the prose is pretty. The Harlem Renaissance is honored instead of rented for atmosphere. And when the reunion lands, it has been paid for. You feel everything you put into these two people come back at once.
How it landed
I have been thinking about it since I closed it. That is how you know. There is a stretch — two people tired, out of armor, the truth finally in the room — where she gives him something she has not said out loud, and he does not run and he does not fix. He stays. That is the want. To be known and not left. Ryan writes love as courage: not the movie poster kind, the kind that requires you to know yourself well enough to offer the whole of it. Score is the fullest version of that I have read from her.
The honest part
I enjoyed it. It is heavy. Cannonball Read said it plainly: this is not the frothy one. It still pays off because it is a romance, and Ryan does not leave people in the wreck. Monk and Verity were already in Reel as history you could feel; this book is the whole argument. I am going back for book one because I want the Harlem Renaissance from the other chairs — Canon and Neevah, the lupus, the understudy night — and because the hype was not a trick. No score out of five. If a page about bipolar, a family that could not hold a diagnosis, or a love that asked too much brings up more than it settles, 988 is available. The book can wait.
