TWICE IN A BLUE MOON

A movie star gets a rewrite for her disastrous first love story in the latest from Lauren (The Unhoneymooners, 2019, etc.).

Tate Butler is on a trip to London with her grandmother when she meets Sam Brandis and his adoptive father. Luther, Sam explains, and his wife, Roberta, who is Sam’s biological grandmother, raised him as their own to salvage a family scandal. Tate can relate. Her father, Ian Butler, is a movie star, and ever since her parents split up, she, her mother, and her grandmother have been hiding from the spotlight under a different last name. Just between them, Tate adds, she loves her mom, but she longs to be an actor like her dad. With that, Sam becomes Tate’s confidant and her first love. But when she returns from London, her life is turned upside down—Sam has leaked her story to the press, and now she can never go back to normal. Fast-forward to a few years later, when the bulk of the story takes place, and Tate has landed the starring role in a new film—about a white woman and a black man who fall in love and fight for civil rights in the 1960s—and her famous father will be playing her father on screen. The problem is, Sam wrote the screenplay under a pen name. And by the time Tate finds this out, it’s too late to back out. Stuck together on a remote set location for the duration of the shoot, the two rarely see each other through the fog of Tate’s many handlers and co-stars. Tate’s frosty relationship with her father also chills the air. But the story of how Sam came up with the script idea and why he sold her out so many years ago is worth the wait, and the rich family backstories add sweetness to the superficial Hollywood setting.

Less snarky and broader in scope than the usual Lauren romance—a twist that offers readers something unexpected and new.