ARC Review: Annie Knows Everything by Rachel Wood

Thank you to the author and the publisher for sending me a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

Release date: 21 April 2026

Blurb:

Annie thinks she knows what’s best for everyone. But when her life goes sideways, the inner workings of her own heart become a total mystery–can she stumble her way to happily ever after?

After getting let go from her job and learning her sister is engaged to the worst man alive, Annie needs a win. Filling the open role in her company’s data strategy team is just what the doctor ordered. So what if she doesn’t know how to write code? How hard can it be? Surely Connor–the team’s overworked, aggravating, and distractingly hot interim head–will soon realize how capable Annie is.

Annie sets her sights on landing this new job, even if that means ignoring the chemistry building between her and her new boss, and she tries to (gently!) convince her sister to reconsider her engagement. But with sparks flying at work and at home, she begins to see how complicated taking matters into her own hands can be. Maybe, just maybe, Annie doesn’t actually know everything.

My Thoughts:

I haven’t felt so excited by a book and unable to put it down for a long time. Annie Knows Everything gave me flashbacks to early 2000s rom-coms and had me giggling the whole way through. This is a swoon-worthy romance that has instantly become one of my all-time favourites. I finished the book in one sitting and immediately started it again the next day.

Annie is hilarious, unapologetically herself and self-assured. She gets into a lot of incidents that are hard to turn away from. After each chapter ends, I kept turning the page to read another. It was a very addictive read.

She loses her job at a big tech firm when a bunch of people are made redundant and, with the help of her friend Carrie, wrangles her way out of the product department redundancies onto the data strategy team without any knowledge on the subject. How she goes about this is bold and hilarious. I loved her character progression and as a reader was rooting for her success from the start.

While she does have moments of being ridiculously upfront about what she wants, I liked how she became an important part of the team and the friendship she made with the small group of men she worked with. They had a great dynamic and I think their friendship as a group was one of my favourite aspects of the entire book. All the witty, silly banter and conversations made for an entertaining read.

No character felt like a spare part in this novel – from the team she worked with to her friends she had outside the office. Carrie and Sam were a great insight into Annie’s world. I liked their friendship but also how her friends also had character development and a subplot too.

Her family life was an interesting plot point. We find her relationship with them at the start more strained, particularly her sister Shannon as a result of an incident that happened two years prior. While Annie doesn’t get the conclusion she necessarily wants in all aspects of her life, I did like that she learnt valuable lessons like she can’t control the lives of people she cares about no matter what they choose to do. Her relationship strengthening with her family through the book was also nice to read too. Even though we see things through the perspective of Annie, it was written really well as other characters didn’t always see things the same way as her – including her mother and Connor.

Connor was a great romantic addition to this story but I also liked that the two had a lovely friendship as well. He was kind, patient and liked to tease her in the same way the other members of the team did. And the same way Annie did to them too. I loved his character arc and how he found everything Annie did both enduring and funny. The workplace romance trope was done brilliantly and their relationship didn’t feel forced or jump out of nowhere.

There was a lot of miscommunication happening with a lot of characters in this book which I know isn’t a favourite trope of a lot of readers but I thought it was done really well. It made sense for the characters, it felt realistic to what could happen in real life and actually enhanced the story.

The book is set in New York and Canada since Annie moved to the city to work many year prior. It was a great backdrop for the story, in a bustling city and the office being very modernised. It felt inviting like you wish you could step into that world. I also thought the pace of the story was perfect. There were no scenes that felt like filler or that I wanted to skip. Everything had a purpose.

Even though I’ve devoured this book twice (in single sittings), I expect to return to it. If you love a romance where the main character has a lot of progression and a life outside of the relationship then I think you’d love this one. It would be great read for fans of Sophie Kinsella’s Can You Keep a Secret? novel and author Emily Henry as well. Definitely add this one to your 2026 reading list. I’m already eagerly awaiting the author’s next book.

Rating: 5/5 ⭐️

What are some of your most anticipated reads of 2026? Let me know in the comments.

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