SHOOTING STARS ABOVE

In Leavy’s romance, a new couple must confront past traumas without destroying their fledgling relationship.

The book opens as 38-year-old Tess Lee meets Jack Miller for the first time while enjoying a drink alone at a bar. Their connection is instant and intense. After leaving the bar together they quickly become inseparable, and before long they’re professing their love to each other and sharing deep secrets. Tess reveals on their first night together that she was the victim of physical and emotional abuse as a child. Jack, in turn, tells Tess about the horrors he witnessed in his government positions fighting terrorism. They quickly introduce each other to the important people in their lives (“Do you think it will seem strange to our friends, how deeply we feel about each other after such a short time?”), which is when Jack learns that Tess, rather than being just another run-of-the-mill writer (as she’d implied), is actually an incredibly well-known and bestselling author. Seeing the opulence in which she lives, he’s floored, and worries that he might not be enough for her. Though Tess is able to quell his concerns, she soon suffers a traumatic experience and retreats into herself in a way that makes her doubt she can ever be sufficiently whole enough to meet the needs of her new love. While the novel moves surprisingly quickly at the beginning, with the characters sharing personal secrets and profound declarations when they are little more than strangers, the jarring pace does even out before the book’s halfway point. The narrative would have benefited from additional setting details to help ground readers and counterbalance the preponderance of dialogue. While the story flirts with the idea of Tess suffering from disordered eating as a result of her difficult past, the issue is portrayed inconsistently and is never resolved. Even so, there is an alluring hopefulness to the work as the author portrays the characters exploring each other and themselves as they struggle to recover from difficult pasts. Beyond the romantic themes, the narrative does manage to tackle several other difficult issues with grace, ranging from grief and self-doubt to self-love and second chances.

An uplifting, if overly sweet, story about the healing power of love.