With her debut novel Grape Juice, Eliza Dumais brings her fresh voice—and an even fresher template—to the contemporary romance genre, elevating it with a literary flair. The book has all the elements of a spunky European summer romance novella: a picturesque vineyard, a cast of strangers gathered for the harvest, fleeting encounters that promise intensity. Then, Dumais adds depth and dimension far beyond the seasonal escapist set-up, creating something that is at once tender, thoughtful, and quietly subversive.
The novel opens with Alice, a New Yorker working in the wine industry, who has been feeling jaded and stagnant. In a terse email, her boss instructs her to spend three and a half weeks in Alsace, joining a group of volunteers for the annual grape harvest. The work is gritty and physical—picking, pressing, destemming, sorting, barreling—but Alice, determined to channel main character energy, accepts. Once there, she finds herself among a mismatched, international group of volunteers: Ruby, her breezy Australian roommate; Henri, sharp and observant; Pietro, the twenty-two-year-old Italian; and Julian, the forthright German. For Alice, what began as a professional obligation becomes a chance to reclaim ownership of her life, her choices, and perhaps, her heart.
In the hands of Dumais, Alice gets a well-rounded personality few protagonists are lucky to receive. While Alice begins as the archetypal urban professional on a work trip, the vineyard setting allows her to shed that identity. Alice learns to inhabit a space without qualifiers. As the volunteers begin working together, they spend hours chatting with each other about their lives, unencumbered by the vagaries of real life. Henri likens this act to therapy:
This is what we do here: We talk. Among les vendangeurs, there are no stakes—we don’t know each other in the real world. We don’t have friends in common. We don’t work in the same offices. I’m Alsace; you’re New York. So, all day, while we have no choice but to work right across from each other, we talk. It’s like therapy.
It’s a risky metaphor, but Dumais treats it with nuance, showing how distance from “real life” allows for honesty without turning these confessions into melodrama. This is what makes Grape Juice feel distinct from a typical contemporary romance: It is not merely a patchwork of tropes strung together, but a story that dares to find meaning in small gestures and quiet conversations. In this sense, it shares a kinship with Claire Daverley’s Talking at Night and Carley Fortune’s One Golden Summer, which also braid summer settings with emotional honesty.
The highlight of the novel is Dumais’s willingness to look directly at the hard parts of love. The vineyard becomes a site of confessions, where characters open up not only about their current relationship statuses but also about earlier loves—how they began, why they ended, what lingers. These conversations range across a spectrum: Some relationships formed by design, some by default, some marked by passion, some by comfort. Rather than being deployed as plot twists or character gimmicks, these stories are woven into the fabric of who the characters are. When Alice shares details about her past relationship, it does not read as an attempt to manufacture drama or to make readers think of her in a particular way; it reads as natural, almost incidental, the way such things emerge in real conversations. The effect is quietly comforting.
Characters admit to choices made simply to feel something, to the fleeting but still valid intensity of certain encounters, to the compromises and trade-offs that shape long-term bonds. Love, in its many forms, need not be tidy to be worthwhile. Ruby says it best: “Listen, you know my feelings about romance: Everything is justifiable in context.”
Much of the novel’s power comes from its prose. On a sentence level, Dumais writes with precision and lushness, capturing activities, people, and landscapes in ways that make them tactile and vivid. Characters grow through introspection, quiet shifts in perspective, and layered conversations rather than contrived revelations. If there is one element slightly harder to reconcile, it is the pace of Alice and Henri’s relationship. Their dynamic is well-laid, textured with chemistry and curiosity, but the speed at which it solidifies into intimacy feels brisk compared to the otherwise careful unfolding of the novel. Yet Dumais manages to avoid the pitfalls of “insta-love.” The relationship, while accelerated, never feels like a fantasy shortcut; it is grounded in nuance and dialogue. Their decisions, while sudden, are not rash. The effect is reminiscent of the oft-quoted observation about falling in love: It starts slowly at first, and then all at once.
It also helps that Dumais’s personal background in the wine industry lends credibility to the novel. Metaphors drawn from the vineyard flow naturally into Alice’s observations, enriching both her character and the book’s language. Alice, in many ways, becomes a vessel for Dumais’s own voice: measured, attentive, and deeply attuned to the labor behind beauty.
Ultimately, Grape Juice works because it refuses to let genre expectations dictate its shape. Dumais leans on strong characters rather than formulaic arcs, crafting a short novel that feels equally at home in the romance aisle and on a literary fiction shelf. For readers who want their love stories effervescent but also substantive, Grape Juice offers a glass worth savoring to the last drop.
Publisher: 831 Stories
Publication Date: November 4, 2025
Reviewed by Kritika Narula
Kritika Narula is a writer, journalist, content marketer, and essayist from Delhi, India. Her writing has also appeared in World Review of Books, The Hooghly Review, Usawa Literary Review, Ghudsavar Magazine, Kitaab, Compulsive Reader, Lobster Salad and Champagne Magazine, The AuVert Magazine, Sanity by Tanmoy, among others. She writes a newsletter with weekly news about books at Kritikal Reading. You can find her at kritikanarula.com or Instagram @kritika.narula and Threads @kritika.narula.