Act Like It

by Lucy Parker

November 30, 2015 · Carina Press

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Genre: Contemporary Romance, Romance

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The Squee Cannon is set to ALL CAPS MULTI-LAYERED AWESOMESAUCE. Earplugs may be advised.

I mentioned this book during our most recent Whatcha Reading? post, and I talked about it during a podcast interview, so I figured I should talk about it here in the “Reviews” section because YOU GUYS I LIKED THIS BOOK SO MUCH I READ IT TWICE.

As in, I finished it, had the Queen Mother of all Good Book Sighs, backed up and started reading it again.

I NEVER DO THAT. EVER. My TBR could potentially crush me into tiny bits if it were physical instead of digital. I don’t instantly re-read anything. This, I read twice back to back without even considering looking at another book. I REALLY LIKED IT A LOT in case that isn’t clear.

Lainie Graham is a stage actress in London, currently under contract for a historical drama at a somewhat decrepit theatre. Her most recent ex plays her on-stage love interest, and she’s pretty banged up emotionally because he dumped her by taking up with someone else and allowing the gossip pages to tell Lainie about that development. Now she has to kiss him several times a day on stage and pretend to fall in love with him over and over. Because of the horrible, no good, dastardly way in which she was dumped, there’s an enormous emo-wave of public sympathy framing her public persona. She’s beloved and pitied.

The villain in the stage performance is played by Richard Troy, who is a Very Well Known Actor of Great Reputation Artistically and Dubious Reputation Personally because he has a temper, he’s very talented and he knows it, and he’s grumpy and pretty misanthropic generally. Those same gossip pages have printed many folio’s worth of words on everything he does, so he’s the temperamental, artistically gifted, feared-but-admired theatre celebrity.

Because the play isn’t doing so well at the box office, the folks in charge decide that a faux romance between Lainie and Richard would help ticket sales, in part because one photograph of them leaving a recent event at the same time, and thus published as if they were “leaving together,” generated a lot of interest in the play immediately after the photo’s publication.

Lainie and Richard think this is a terrible idea. Richard barely acknowledges Lainie, and she’s pretty sure he’s the biggest asshole on either side of the Thames, but the folks in charge make a very convincing argument as to why they should play along. Richard has ambitions to lead one of the more austere and prestigious royal drama societies, and cleaning up his tempermental jerkwad reputation by “dating” Lainie would help. Some of her golden girl/sympathy/good will would rub off on him with each new photo.  As for Lainie, she supports a children’s cancer charity that’s very close to her heart called Shining Lights, and she ruthlessly negotiates that the show profits for every Saturday for a month will be donated to the organization. If she plays along, her charity will get a major donation – and public awareness about her as an actress will increase from being seen with Richard for awhile. Her star gets a boost, his gets a bit of polish, and they both benefit, as does the show they’re in.

There are a TON of things I loved about this story. First, as I mentioned earlier this month, the language is part of the setting and gives the story a unique complexity in the world building. There were words I don’t usually encounter in fiction that I understood in context, such as “stroppy,” “sarky git,” or “naff,” and I LOVED that. For me as a reader, the language that the characters and the very-omniscient narrator used helped make everything else more real and more vivid. It was an essential part of the world building of two actors in London theatre, and it was delicious. Plus, each character had a distinctive style of speaking, and their dialogue was so very much in-character that any tags identifying who said what weren’t always needed.

I also liked the characters individually. Part of what worked with this plot set up was that Lainie didn’t have much to lose, and a lot to gain, so she really didn’t give a shit whether Richard liked her, or whether she needed to act a certain way to attain his approval. She didn’t care either way – so she was herself. She took exactly zero crap from him, and called him out on his more obnoxious behavior, which in turn caused him to reconsider how he treated people, and, more importantly, how his actions were being interpreted – something he hadn’t really bothered to think about before.

I also love that Lainie is a very talented actress, and she knows it. When her self-confidence takes a hit by being dumped in such a humiliating manner, she owns it, and she’s trying to patch herself back up again because it’s her responsibility. But she’s also aware that, personality differences aside, Richard is also extremely talented, and steals the stage from her ex and the other actors just by showing up an inch past the proscenium. Lainie is confident in herself and in who she is as a person and as an actor, but when Richard gives her an off-hand compliment couched in derision for a project she’s considering, she’s shocked and very pleased. Lainie has gotten where she is without a great deal of support or assistance from others, so to have someone whose talent she admires compliment her means a great deal.

Richard, on the other hand, is very wealthy and lives in the bubble of the very wealthy who don’t need other people very much. He’s got the requisite horrible parents (now dead) and piles of money he doesn’t need with incredible sports cars to match, and his wealth plus his talent make him incredible condescending. That same wealth and talent also mean that, until Lainie, no one has dared call him out when he’s being a dick. She does, and he’s knocked on his ass by it several times – which I enjoyed.

So does Lainie:

Lainie could have offered to bluff an excuse while Richard stayed home to enjoy whatever he usually did on a Saturday morning. She assumed it involved excellent espresso and some heavy self-Googling.

Clearly, she was not a nice person. Because she had rarely enjoyed any sight more than that of Richard Troy at a village fete, wedged between two of the more terrifying representatives of the local Women’s Institute. He looked as if he’d accidentally fallen through a portal into the third circle of hell.

The humor in this book is constant, too. It builds and becomes more intricate, involving jokes about plays, Shakespeare, and gossip culture, until by the end the reader is part of the inside jokes of their relationship. It’s lovely.

Another aspect I loved was the way in which social media, gossip, and celebrity culture affect Lainie and Richard. Because of his wealth and the social and political standing of his parents, he’s always been subjected to attention. Lainie was not, and at one point he judges her for being aware of what gossip blogs say about her, and for hunting down specific reactions to their performance. Lainie points out how, unlike him, she doesn’t know where her next acting contract will come from, and she’s not independently wealthy, and so always being watched is a benefit and a curse of being a minor stage celebrity. She knows she might be photographed at any time, but she also knows she has to use that attention carefully to advance her career. So while Richard will walk straight into the theatre without talking to anyone waiting outside, Lainie always pauses for pictures, signs autographs, and talks to the fans who stand around hoping for a glimpse of them. Lainie’s intelligence and awareness of herself were two of my favorite things about her.

I also love that she’s not rail-thin and physically “perfect.” She’s pretty, and has long red hair and has features that work for her as an actress, but she’s also very top heavy with a large bust, and her struggle to find celebrity-appearance clothing that fits her shows up continually in the story.

And if you’re a reader who likes a gruff, grumpy, socially awkward and curmudgeonly hero who is redeemed by the heroine and forced to reconsider his behavior, you’ll very much like Richard. I did. Parker does a very good job of balancing why he is the way he is with room to reconsider his actions and change them authentically. Richard has to pretend to publicly care about Lainie, and has to act as if he’s interested in her. So by pretending and doing things he wouldn’t normally do, like holding her hand when she’s nervous before an appearance on television, he learns how to act when he really does care about her feelings, and surprises himself with the realization that where she’s concerned, he isn’t really acting at all.

Did I mention the funny? I laughed so hard I was asked by everyone in my family what was wrong with me. Here’s a sample:

Lainie picked up the cat for a cuddle, tucking its head under her chin, and he saw it properly for the first time.

“What the fuck is wrong with its face?”

She looked offended on the cat’s behalf, but seriously. A cross between Walter Matthau and a sundried tomato.

Lifting the cat slightly away from her, Lainie looked from its grumpy face to Richard. And then back again. She walked over and held it up next to him. “Hmmm.”

“Don’t say it.”

“Hashtag twinsies.”

Richard is also to a delightful extent made up of my favorite trope: I don’t want to like you. I don’t want to like you. I don’t want to find you remotely interesting. I like my life the way it is, and I don’t want to like you and I can’t stop thinking about your hair, DAMMIT.  There’s a good amount of Richard grousing about the inconvenience of having feelings, and then mocking himself for it, and I enjoyed that more than I should have, especially when Lainie was involved to bug him about it, too.

There were times when the plot was a hair too dramatic, when things happened to Lainie that seemed a bit over the top, or when things come crashing down in a way that seemed a bit too unreal, given how very lifelike and believable the characters were. Part of the conflict comes from the tension between them and mistakes they make, and part of it comes from Richard’s constant mis-judgment of Lainie’s past relationship with their co-star, the one who dumped her so publicly. Some tension comes from her family, and from the pressure of being watched, and that made a lot of sense. But the black moment is built up in rapid layers, so it escalates to levels that I think some readers may find hard to believe. I personally was on board for most of it, even though I knew that some of the forces acting against them both were a little ridiculous. The epilogue is so incredibly sweet, though, that for me, the over-build was worth it.

But in my notes and in the passages I highlighted as I read, I keep coming back to how much the language of the story is as important as the characters and the plot and the emotional growth. I loved that Lainie didn’t have any reason to pretend or act with Richard, and was determined to be herself and tell him when he was being awful. I loved this unique spin on celebrity romance, where Richard is very well known as an esteemed actor, while Lainie’s career is newer, and so they both interact with celebrity social media culture in different ways. I loved that both characters had no shits to give for very different reasons, and in the course of being themselves under artificial circumstances, they discover wonderful compatibility hidden beneath false pretenses. This story made me tremendously happy. I liked this book so much, I read it twice.

Like I said, that never happens.