Starstruck

Starstruck (2014) L.A. Witt (Bluewater Bay)

Levi Pritchard retired from Hollywood, tired of being typecast.

(H)e was pretty sure some of them were still furious about the piece of Eastwick fanfic he’d anonymously penned a while back. It was still floating around out there somewhere, along with all the angry— and some alarmingly supportive— comments from the readers who couldn’t believe its author had gleefully killed the guy in such grisly fashion.

In the intervening years, he’s worked to try and mend his relationship with his parents–which is one more reason he’s never come out as bi.

It meant coming out, at thirty-eight goddamned years old, to his parents. His ultraconservative, disapproving, hypocritical parents who’d never quite left the 1950s, who expected their kids to forgive decades of alcohol-fueled misery, and had all but disowned his sister after her long-overdue divorce.

A famous TV show has moved to Blackwater Bay, and they are about to bring in a new character, and they want Levi to play him–he left Hollywood precisely because he couldn’t get these kinds of roles.

Carter Samuels, the star of Wolf’s Landing is out and the show is popular, has he’s had a crush on Levi for years, and acting with Levi would be like a dream come true, but he has no interest in dating a closeted guy.

I had issues with the story. The fact that the studio was threatening to replace Levi wasn’t one of them–this was written in 2014 after all. But that fact was glossed over at the end of the book, as if it never really mattered.

Then there was the big issue of Levi’s family. I get that Levi wanted to try and salvage things with his parents, but… they really weren’t deserving of that effort. And it was never clear what kind of relationship Levi had with his sister. Was his sister going to disown him if he came out? If not, then he wouldn’t lose “his family” just his shitty parents who weren’t much of a loss. And if he was close to his sister, how come she didn’t know he was bi?

It just bothered me–she was thrown in there as an example of how awful Levi’s parents were, but she had no existence outside of that. If Levi had supported her in her divorce, wouldn’t he have trusted her with his secrets? Wouldn’t he have trusted her to love him if he came out as bi? And if not, why the hell was he putting so much work into his family?

And a quick note–they almost never use the term bi, even though Levi had relationships with men and women, the only term that was regularly used was gay.

Publisher: Riptide Publishing
Rating: 6.5/10

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