Rating: 3.5 stars
Thanks to Netgalley and G.B. Putnam for this ARC. My opinion is my own.
Jane Jackson spent her adolescence as the comic relief character "Janey Jakes" on a popular teen sitcom. Now she's a creative executive at a movie studio, and really trying to get a script she loves turned into a movie. Frequently crippled with anxiety and self esteem issues, Jane has learned to "fake it till you make it", but she may have faked it too far this time. Desperate to get the movie script approved by her boss, she lied and claimed that Jack Quinlan, one of the hottest pop stars around, promised to write a song for the soundtrack.
Except Jane hasn't seen or spoken to Jack for twenty years, since they recorded a hit song for her sitcom. His agent refuses to pass on her messages to him, and her only way to possibly get a chance to talk to him is to track him down at a music festival in Long Island. To accomplish this, she will need to ally herself with the man she briefly crushed on and now loathes, artsy cinematographer Dan Finnegan. His family lives in the town in Long Island where Jack will be playing, and he offers to take Jane, since he needs to go to a family reunion there anyway.
Jane, having assumed that Dan is from some rich and elitist family, is surprised to discover that his family are all farmers and construction workers, and he's the odd one out, an introverted artist in a family full of outgoing and gregarious labourers. While it's obvious that Dan loves his parents and brothers, he's also not entirely comfortable among them, and that everyone automatically assumes that Dan and Jane are dating further complicates matters.
Jane is forced to realise that her second impression of Dan (after finding him very appealing at their first meeting) as pretentious and judgmental is quite incorrect, and that her first impression, that he's a charming and interesting person whom she could possibly fall for, is much closer to the truth. Unfortunately, Jane has never been lucky in love before, and doubts that there could be anything serious between her and Dan, even if they do succeed in their wild quest to track down Jack Quinlan.
As is far too often the case with me, I'm really behind on my reviews and trying desperately to remember the plots of books I read months ago. Honesty forces me to admit that despite my having finished this book a mere month ago, I'm having real trouble remembering a lot of details of the story. I had to read both the official synopsis and glance at several reviews on Goodreads to remind myself of what actually happens.
I remember that Jane has self-esteem issues, not helped by her father abandoning her and her mother when she was younger. She became a teen TV star to help pay the bills, and her crush ended in a rather humiliating experience. She keeps following her co-stars from the sitcom on social media, and they all seem to have vastly more successful lives than her.
Dan is a cinematographer who made a very critically acclaimed, but otherwise mostly overlooked, movie. He also takes a lot of photos, and that's how he and Jane first met. They had undeniable chemistry, but before they had a chance to get to know each other, Dan shot down a script idea in a meeting with Jane's boss, and now she resents him.
While they're in Long Island they stay in bunk beds in Dan's old room (the whole house is full of his brothers and in-laws there for his parents' wedding anniversary) and chat a lot, and they take bike rides and go to the beach and do all sorts of adorable things, and yet it all blends together in my head, and I can't remember what episodes happened in The Love Haters (a vastly less entertaining book, which nevertheless had a heroine with anxiety and self-esteem issues, and was set by the sea, so had scenes involving bathing) and what happened in this one. There were quite a few nice, heart-warming scenes with Dan's family, I think?
I don't really feel like I can rate a book I have such a hazy memory of any higher than 3.5 stars, but I am absolutely open to reading more of Monaghan's books in the future.
Judging a book by its cover: A lot of times, these covers have absolutely nothing to do with anything that happens in this story. But the curly-haired woman, with the blue polka-dotted bathing suit, is exactly like Jane is described in the book. So while it's yet another animated cover (le sigh), it at least fits the content of the story.
Crossposted on Cannonball Read
No comments:
Post a Comment