scioscribe

I am probably not the ideal audience for Falling Stars. It sets up a number of tropes I love--two people stuck in a remote resort, identity porn, star-crossed lovers, Hollywood, redemption--and almost immediately pulls the teeth out of all of them to make them more pleasant. Except the "stuck in a remote resort" bit: credit where credit is due, Lake actually appealingly doubles down on that one and snows them in at one point right when they might otherwise be splitting up. It's glorious. I love some direct weather intervention on behalf of Love.

But aside from that, I wound up feeling a little cheated. It isn't that Lake is especially interested in subverting any tropes, it's more that her characters are just too nice for any real conflict to persist between them or even inside them. I can sometimes do nice, but not usually when I came for the above premises.

Christine Lawton is a successful actress currently holed up at the Constellation Lodge in the off-season--she's on-track to be the latest trashy Hollywood scandal because she punched a producer in the face and then drunk-drove her Porsche into a lamp post. Oh, yeah, and then the cops found a baggie full of cocaine in her car. You might think that somewhere between the assault, the DWI, and the coke possession, Christine would have bigger things to worry about then whether or not she has to wait out the PR disaster in a resort, but apparently not. And she has no real rehabilitation to worry about, either, because just as none of these things seemingly present legal problems, they don't represent personal flaws, either. Christine punched the producer in the face Because Justice, because he was insulting and dismissive of a lesbian coming-of-age film Christine had been trying to push through, and was planning on bowdlerizing it to be the coming-of-age story of a straight liberal white boy in the Midwest. (This is hauntingly plausible.) She drove drunk, but she totally wouldn't have if she hadn't been so upset! And the cocaine wasn't even hers! She was just holding it for a friend!

At this point I feel like interspersing some clapping-hands emojis: Let the actress snort the coke.

Anyway, Christine runs into Jennifer, who is there to do a last push on her novel. She had one book out already, but it was an expansion of someone else's story, and she wants something that's all hers, despite her well-connected and pushy father constantly suggesting that hey, it's no big deal if she doesn't have any originality, adaptation is a talent too, he can get her so many stories, seriously. Which could be helpful under other circumstances, but not so much when it's in direct contrast to what his daughter actually wants. This is all pretty nuanced and well-done, and Jennifer's self-consciousness about her writing and her impostor-syndrome feeling of not being a real author is convincing.

Jennifer hates Hollywood as an industry and has no idea who Christine is, so when they have a meet-cute with Christine accidentally dropping her phone on Jennifer's head, Christine gets the pleasure of interacting with someone who doesn't know her fame or her recent scandal. They hit it off. Lake is really good at their banter and flirtation, and there's a bit I particularly like where Jennifer initially lies and says the phone barely grazed her shoulder only to later drunkenly admit that it clocked her on the head--it's a nice, realistic bit of awkward early crush. Their relationship moves a little fast, but it's reasonably believable given the confined situation.

The problem is the way all the obstacles disappear when the characters face them with emotional maturity. In real life, this is good. In fiction, I find it gets a little boring. I like characters in high-conflict situations to be confronted by hard choices and the need for action and messiness, but I recognize that pleasant, healthy communication romance is in fact a market, even if it's not something I personally want. So I'm sure there are people who would like that:

1) When Christine finally tells Jennifer that she's a famous actress, it isn't a big deal that she's been lying to her.

2) When Jennifer realizes that her father is the homophobic producer Christine punched in the face, she's not mad at Christine and in fact not even super surprised by her dad's behavior, since he's known to be abrasive and she's always suspected he might be homophobic, hence why she never came out to him as bi.

3) When Christine finds out that Jennifer gave her her maiden name and not her legal last name, all the better to separate her from her father, it isn't a big deal.

4) Despite the obstacles of making the lesbian coming-of-age movie, there's no actual apparent hit to Christine's fame or image when it (and she) comes out. Institutionalized homophobia is there to be the bad guy who is defeated by everyone believing in themselves. This actually could have been handled in a way that would have worked for me--one that explored the way audience response is sometimes less bigoted than Hollywood anticipates, or one that looks at the compensations Christine might find from being out and a queer icon even as she loses some of her mainstream cachet--but Falling Stars just doesn't have the length for it.

5) Jennifer's struggle over how to write original work that's meaningful to her is solved by... adapting a novel that's meaningful to her? Which seems like not the same thing? I'm okay with this, too, but I feel like the fact that it doesn't actually address her concern about her originality should have been worked out a little more.

6) Everybody is just so nice.

This is a likable, if slight, book. Lake writes smoothly and has a good sense of her characters' chemistry. I just wish everything hadn't worked out so easily and so immediately.