Us in Ruins

Margot is on the quest to uncover and reassemble an ancient—and cursed—vase, with the help of a boy who went missing in 1932, because it's the only way to put back together her broken heart in this standa-lone adventure rom-com, perfect for fans of What the River Knows and The Lost City.

The mythical Vase of Venus Aurelia hasn’t been seen since 1932, but Margot Rhodes is determined to change that.

Drawn by the vase’s supposed magical properties, Margot embarks on her school’s archaeological trip to Pompeii. Sure, it’s her first time holding a shovel, but she’s got something no one else does: lost teenage explorer Van Keane’s journal.

Poring over the poetic entries that serve as a map to the vase’s missing shards, Margot finds herself falling in love with the boy who wrote it a century ago. She’s shocked when her search leads her to a statue that looks exactly like Van, and then the statue comes to life.

Catapulted into the present, Van is nothing like the wordsmith Margot imagined. He’s all sharp edges, intent on retrieving the relic for all the wrong reasons. But it takes two to survive Venus’s death-defying challenges, and, together, Margot and Van must excavate the treasure—and their buried pasts—before their story ends in ruins.

With a blend of humor, magic, and love, Rachel Moore crafts another stand-alone adventure rom-com full of double- and triple-crosses, hilarious shenanigans, and frustration-fueled banter, where the best treasure is true love.

Rachel Moore is a content marketer and writer living in Nashville, Tennessee. She graduated from the University of Evansville with a degree in creative writing, and she has never met a rom-com she didn’t love. On the rare occasion she isn’t writing happy endings, you can find her collecting dictionaries, drinking entirely too much coffee, and drifting through library stacks.