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.
Full review on my blog.