Meet Me Under the Lights

By Cassie Miller

A Romeo & Juliet-inspired small-town baseball romance where the son and daughter of two rival families must decide if their love is worth the risk.

High school junior Eliza Crowley is known as the Princess of Fairfield, a farm town in North Carolina that loves two things--tradition and baseball. Although Eliza loves "the game," her life goal is to become a lighting designer on Broadway. Shaking off her reputation as the rich girl and focusing on her town's community theater production are what she's set her sights on this summer, and nothing will stand in her way. That is until Reed Fulton, the grandson of a struggling Fairfield farmer, and ace pitcher of the Fulton Hawks, returns to town.

Reed dreams of putting the catastrophe of last season behind him and leading the Hawks to a championship victory against the Crowley Cardinals. But when his childhood friend turned stranger, Eliza, strolls back into his life, she makes his heart accelerate quicker than his fastball, and he's not sure he can stay away from the girl he's supposed to despise.

Small-town summers and baseball draw Reed and Eliza together, even though the Crowleys and the Fultons are determined to run each other out of town. When the families make a deal to settle their thirty-year-long dispute once and for all, Eliza and Reed are stuck in the middle during the most important summer of their lives.

Heartwarming, captivating, and full of emotion, Meet Me Under the Lights is a pitch-perfect romance that will have readers hooked right off the bat.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0FBWGHHH2
• ISBN13: 9798217038923
• Release Date: March 2026
• Publisher: Viking Books for Young Readers
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 0.67 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.2"
• Age Range: 12 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 7 and higher

Customer Reviews

trope-filled romance

Eliza Crowley's focus should be the lighting for the summer play. Not on her childhood friend, Reed Fulton, who is back in town to play baseball. Apparently, her dad just put their baseball stadium up for grabs to who wins the season. The two families have been in fued since that Stadium. Reed has to get his head in the game because his grandad's farm is in danger, but it's not only baseball that gets his attention. Childhood friends plus feuding families plus wealth gap romance tropes are on this one. And it's a sports romance! However, I do love the focus on theater too. I do like all those dynamics. I know that's a lot but I love how all these were casually mentioned. The author found that balance of all of that in the plot. I love how the characters actually deal with real problems and real consequences. I appreciate that this could easily be a story of a normal person. But it is romance, so we do have that adorable cheesy love story. And this is a proper sports romance. Though it was a summarized version of the game, I got excited when the game was on the page. The characters are really good for me. I actually don't have complaints about them because it's the situations that the characters are in that made the book exciting. From the main character to the minor characters, they are very important to the story and I like them. Overall, I liked the story very much. I enjoyed reading it till I finished at three in the morning. * I received an eARC of this book