Celebrity romance is one of my favorite tropes, so I was sure to scoop up Twice in a Blue Moon by Christina Lauren. This is a first love/ second chance romance as well, and it’s set in two parts: when the hero and heroine meet for the first time, and when they reconnect fourteen years later. I really enjoyed the first part of the book, but I felt like there wasn’t as much focus on the main couple’s relationship in the second half, and there definitely wasn’t enough grovel to satisfy me. Added to that, I really loathed the character of the heroine’s father, and the amount of attention he got in the book irked me.
The book opens in London where Tate Jones is celebrating graduating high school by going on a two week dream vacation with her grandma. During dinner one night, Tate and her grandmother meet two other Americans, Sam Brandis and his grandfather, Luther. They’re also on a once-in-a-lifetime trip, and are staying at the same hotel. They wind up doing some sightseeing together, and at night Sam and Tate sneak out to spend time together in the hotel’s garden. Tate and Sam wind up having a two-week fling. He’s her first love, and her first lover. During this time Tate confesses to him that she’s the daughter of a movie star, Ian Butler. Ian is not a great guy (cheating, lying, all around douchery) so Tate’s mom took her and moved to a small town where no one knows who they really are.
Then Sam betrays her. One morning Tate wakes up to the paparazzi waiting for her outside the hotel. It turns out that Sam sold her story to The Guardian and now he’s nowhere to be found. She’s understandably heartbroken.
The first part of the book is intense in a couple of ways. First there’s all the emotion of Tate experiencing her first real love. Sam is charming and lovely and a great listener. There are some truly wonderful scenes where Tate and Sam spend all night in the hotel’s dark garden together; in that little bubble of intimacy, away from influences back home, it makes sense that Tate feels secure enough to tell Sam her secret. Sam also entrusts Tate with his own family drama (his dad isn’t so great either) so their confidence in each other doesn’t feel one-sided.
That’s why Sam’s betrayal felt so acutely painful to me as a reader. I remember being Tate’s age and embarking on adult life and trying to figure out who it was safe to be vulnerable around. Tate is not only heartbroken when Sam sells her story to the press, she’s left with a pain that will leave her with intimacy issues for years.
Cut to fourteen years later. After being outed as Ian Butler’s daughter, Tate decided to pursue an acting career of her own. She’s a box-office hit, and she’s due to star in a drama with her father called Milkweed. The media coverage of the movie is pretty heavy since this is the first time Tate and her father will be acting together. So who does Tate meet on set? Sam of course. It turns out he’s the screenwriter.
If you’re wondering why Sam sold Tate out:
Tate forgives Sam for this almost right away. In fact, most of their conflict is cleared up in the matter of a few conversations. Much of the action in the second act is devoted to filming the movie, and on Tate’s relationship with her dad. I felt like the romance between Tate and Sam was resolved too quickly and the plot meandered around a little.
Sam admits that he feels terrible for what he did, but he doesn’t really grovel either. It’s a tricky subject because, on the one hand, I understood his actions, but on the other that doesn’t mitigate the pain he caused Tate. I felt like Tate forgave him easily and quickly, which didn’t fit with the severity of the actual betrayal.
There’s also a lot of other things happening that detract from the focus on Sam and Tate’s relationship. For a little while Tate thinks Sam is married (he’s divorced) which could have been clarified in a two second conversation. Instead the misunderstanding comes off like a contrivance. There’s also Tate’s attraction to her co-star, which ultimately goes nowhere and seemed unnecessary.
And finally, there is Tate’s father, Ian. Way too much time was devoted to Ian. Ian is a narcissist and a world-class POS and he didn’t deserve the pages he got. He makes up stories about Tate as a child to feed to the cast and crew as if he actually bothered to be in her life at all. He’s clearly using Tate’s rising fame to help bolster his slowing career. It’s so obvious, in fact, that I had a hard time with Tate just being okay with her dad’s douchery. He’s total unapologetic about what a shitty father he was. Every time he played the doting dad in public, I wanted to punch him.
Basically Tate has two men of significance in her life who treated/treat her poorly and neither of them gets the swift kick they deserve. I think if there had been less focus on Ian and Tate’s relationship and more on Tate and Sam’s, where some of their issues were explored in more detail, the second half might have been more satisfying.
I did feel that Twice in a Blue Moon did a much better job of explaining the process of filming a movie than most celebrity romances do. There was a deep-dive into a dangerous stunt scene, and even a fair amount of explanation of how sex scenes are filmed. I enjoyed those details quite a bit.
So while I enjoyed Tate and Sam’s whirlwind London romance, I felt like I had to slog through the second half of the book except for the parts that detailed the movie-making process. I also didn’t think Sam or Ian were worthy of Tate’s attention or forgiveness, which meant, at least in the case of Sam, I was fairly “meh” on the HEA.
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Is this “people doing shitty things and failing to atone for them” a theme with Christina Lauren books? I abandoned another one for similar reasons.
I read romance because I want my entertainment to have happiness and a measure of justice (in the sense that we all deserve love and happiness and people who attempt to subvert that get their comeuppance). I have no patience for romances where those conditions aren’t met.
Wow, I feel better at leaving this one unfinished. I got bored somewhere around day two or three in London and ditched the book to go read all of the Men in Hidden Creek books instead: 24 books to avoid finishing 1.
I’ve liked a lot of the Christina Lauren books, but this one fell flat for me. Really flat.
I enjoyed earlier Christina Lauren books, but I DNF’d one last year and this one looks like a DNS (do not start, if that’s a thing). I have no time for books where heroines overlook/minimize years of their own pain for their romantic interest’s benefit.
@ JoanneBB
Yes! Especially when combined with ManPain! Oh, it’s okay because dude has ManPain and everyone knows men get to be shitty when there are male feelings involved. I really really want a book where the heroine has screwed up big time and the hero gets over it in four pages because of her magic vajayjay and his lack of spine.
I swear I’m not usually so angry but it’s been a crappy month.
Yes to everything in your review. What I said in my own review was that I never felt like Tate got to speak her own truth. She lives behind the lies or betrayals of both her father and Sam. The relationship between Sam and Tate certainly warranted more time spent on healing the past regardless of his reasons for doing what he did. And I cringed with every interaction between Tate and her father. Neither relationship issues were dealt with really well in this read, both left me unsatisfied.
I’m with you JoanneBB. With early Christina Lauren books I would obsessively check where I was on my library holds list in anticipation of getting my read on. They have slowly become meh, and I have recently realized that I have DNS’d newer ones. I wonder if because the sexytime level seems to be going down there isn’t a foil or balance to the preponderance of ManPain and other toxicity?
I am in the middle of this book now but think that my feelings may end up being somewhat similar to this review. I just felt Tate’s sense of betrayal so deeply and I’m not even sure the hero could be redeemed for me at this point, but it would have to be a HELLA good grovel at least. Doesn’t sound like that’s where we’re going. Also the dad is a huge douche and I was hoping maybe he would do something to redeem himself by the end of the book but looks like no. I love Christina Lauren’s writing style and most of their books but this one might end up being really unsatisfying for me.
I’m about 2/3 through, and I see your
points, however, I still love the way they write, and I’m enjoying it.
My complaint would be that there aren’t enough pages for the story they’re telling. This seriously needs another 100 pages. I could have used another 20 or 30 just on them finding their way back to each other. I haven’t decided how I feel about only meeting Sam’s grandmother as a character in a script. I feel like she wasn’t the sort of person who would have accepted whatever facile lie Sam told about the money, or what he actually did to get it.
Mostly, my biggest complaint is, as others have pointed out, that Tate’s father is the one who gets protected. Why in the world is everyone so concerned with his reputation? A well publicized car accident with your barely legal-aged mistress pretty much tells the world you’re a not a good person. TATE letting him play doting father in public is enraging. Because after 20 some years, he’s going to become one? I needed the very public snub he deserves, but based on comments, I don’t think I’m going to see one in the next 40 pages.
Team CL has been frustrating me for books on end lately, and this is a great example of why their books have been so unsatisfying lately. I think this is the second book I’ve read, where they valued the hero’s manpain over the heroine’s feelings, and the second time I’ve seen the hero drive all of the plot action as well.
I hated this book so much that after I finished reading it, I had trouble sleeping and had a nightmare about it. Tate was a great and sympathetic characters, but Sam totally didn’t deserve her. It’s not very often that I wish that a book wasn’t a romance so that there isn’t a HEA. I have really enjoyed past Christina Lauren books, but I’m going to be very careful about picking up the next one. Thanks for letting me vent.
Thank you so much for your review! I would have been livid! Just reading the review made me hate the book!
On the bright side? They’re turning Beverley Jenkins’ FORBIDDEN into a movie, and I cannot WAIT. (Please let the casting be amazing. Please let the costumes be amazing. Please let it be a huge hit so that Jenkins Historical Romance takes off as a genre…)
I haven’t read this book or Christiana Lauren, but this seems to sum up so many of problems I have with the romance genre in general. Everything should be forgiven, because Love and Family. And while I have seen it both ways, (hero forgives heroine; heroine forgives hero) it seems like in general the heroine does more forgiving of the hero and nobody gets away with things like a Father or a Hero or both. See Julia London’s Homecoming Ranch.
This book was really disappointing. Sam’s betrayal was such a big big thing; it made it impossible to believe in or be sympathetic towards his character. I do not know how you could ever trust this human again, certainly not so easily, after what he did but within the plot it felt like little more than a hurdle towards the story’s resolution; it was so easily overlooked and so easily forgiven. Consequently I was both bored and annoyed; I did not believe in this story or any of these characters as anything more than tropes. I enjoyed Sarah’s talk with Christina Lauren a few weeks ago but as a long-time resident in the UK can I also add that the Guardian would never pay for a celebrity story like this, any more than the New York Times or Washington Post… The interview highlighted the effectiveness of competence porn in world/story building and a reader’s ability to engage but apart from interesting insights into film production, getting details wrong can have the opposite effect. Star gazing in London is not really a thing. I am being unkind now which is not totally fair, but if the details are important then they need to be right and an edit should have fixed this. (I also don’t think the Meridien on the South Bank has a garden: it used to be City Hall – have you read Noel Streatfield’s Ballet Shoes? That is where the girls go to get their performing licenses. It is a real place but that part of London is solidly urban and the only garden I know there is in front of St Thomas’s hospital… a walk along the South Bank would have been true, and better, or a walk through Westminster Abbey, which is wonderfully romantic and mysterious as a date destination, and just on the other side of Westminster Bridge). My main problem with the story though – Sam’s betrayal – felt worse to me and was more upsetting because Christina Lauren are queens of character based romance stories. Think of Anselm’s mistake that turns into a huge plot point in ‘Sweet Filthy Boy’. It is perfect; he is perfect.
Look here, the Guardian is not the Sun. It’s out of place that the Guardian would regard Tate being on holiday in London was a story, much less pay a life changing sum of money to run it. Brit lint on aisle one, please! The rest of the book sounds equally unappealing.
It has been a trend for CL to gloss over the heroine’s pain. In the Unhoneymooners the hero acts like a jerk does a cheesey gesture and all’s forgiven. It feels like 75% in the authors run out of gas. There is no justice for the heroine or the reader. I agree they need to add more pages to complete the story.
My Goodreads review was heavily influenced by the Ian relationship, too. Might be spoilery…
“Ugh! I did a lot of skimming in this book. And I may have given this book 2 Stars if her father had received the proper smack down that he deserved. What Sam did, though cruel, was fueled by desperation and panic in epic levels. I can almost buy that the isolation of the set, while not off the grid, kept a lot of the external stimuli out, which made avoiding each other and the feelings harder. BUT what her father did was a self-serving calculated cruelty that topped off a lifetime of being a crappy parent. At the VERY least, start calling him Ian instead of Dad. He doesn’t deserve any parental moniker. I repeat, UGH!”
This is the worst Christina Lauren book I have ever read. The constant chatter about the film is very disturbing and anoying. It seems as if the book was written by someone of twelve years old instead of 2 adults. This book is a waste of my money unfortunately