WITH STARS IN HER EYES

Two women artists on individual journeys of self-discovery find each other in a Kansas bookstore.

Thea Quinn is working at a tattoo store while developing her art photography and getting some distance from her family. When she meets Courtney Starling, the cute bookseller next door, she falls hard. Though Courtney is powerfully drawn to the dimple-sporting Southern charmer, the singer-songwriter-cellist is hiding away from a stalled music career after a severe migraine foiled her first concert as a headliner. The cause of her migraines is unresolved, as is her trauma from being exploited by her family as a child performer on the Christian music circuit, as well as her divorce from a blackmailing manipulator from the same community. The two women start bonding over romance novels and art, with their chemistry strengthening over months of intimacy. But Courtney is hiding her past, which eventually spills out as expected. The novel is conscious of its own genre, and as the two women talk books, they make references to plot elements like the slow burn and the third act breakup, which Burke then dramatizes, not always well. We also get the requisite assortment of best friends and small-town quirky characters as well as the villainous ex and some charming episodes, such as a date in a field at night. The adherence to rom-com tropes and types could make for easy reading, but a narrative that alternates between Thea and Courtney’s first-person points of view, plus Courtney’s many names and personas, can be difficult to follow.

A sapphic romance in a small community for those who like secret identities and low-key melodrama.