Beyond the Stars by Stacy Wise

Blurb:
Falling for him wasn’t in the plans…

Most girls would kill for the opportunity to work for Jack McAlister, Hollywood’s hottest actor, but twenty-one-year-old Jessica Beckett is ready to kick him out of her red Ford Fiesta and never look back. She should be spending her junior year in France, eating pastries and sharpening her foreign language skills. Instead she’s reluctantly working as Jack’s personal assistant, thanks to her powerhouse talent agent aunt.

Jack is private, prickly, and downright condescending. Jessica pushes his buttons—she’s not the type of girl to swoon over celebrity heartthrobs, precisely why her aunt thought she’d be perfect for the job—and Jack pushes right back.

But as she begins to peel away his layers, Jessica is shocked to find she craves her boss’s easy smile and sexy blue eyes. The problem is, so does the entire female population. And what started out as the job from hell soon has Jess wondering if a guy like Jack could ever find love with a regular girl like her.

    

My Review:
3 stars — OK, I will admit…I was a bit disappointed.  I’m a sucker for hollywood star falls for normal girl books, I know many of us are.  Strangely enough while I’m a sucker for this trope, I find I’m rarely satisfied with the books who attempt them.  Ah well.  At least I scored this book on sale.

So what went wrong?  I had a hard time liking Jess.  I’m not sure what it was.  She felt a bit immature for the age she supposedly was, but then again, so am I…  Normally I don’t have a problem with that, but maybe I did moreso in this case b/c I had a hard time getting a feel for Jack’s age and he didn’t feel as young, you know?  So I didn’t see a fit between them.  Honestly I felt like she fit Shawn (the trainer) more.

Anyways, back to Jess.  I guess I just didn’t like her attitude.  We didn’t really get a super great feel for what happened in her past to make her to anti-actor, so she just seemed kind of…well, dickish about it all.  She had all these assumptions about Jack that weren’t based on anything but one bad experience, that again…happened in the past, so we didn’t get to feel it with her and it didn’t make me sympathize with her.  And her friendship with Meg really reflected badly on her.  Meg was awful.  And the fact that she needed another friend to point it out to her was kind of crazy.  I guess I can sort of see how you grow up with a person and so you make excuses for them, but Meg was really overboard awful and we never did find out why…  I think b/c she *was* a friend of Jess’s, I would have liked to know why she changed.  Otherwise I didn’t see her purpose in the story, other than the further the housing situation plot and add some drama.

I enjoyed Jack.  I wish I saw more from him.  He was extremely hard to get a read on because we didn’t get his POV, which is fine…but without more conversations between Jess and Jack, I really don’t know much about what he’s like.  It was mostly a Jess book.  And quite honestly this just made for a very shallow and unfulfilling romance for me.  And it wasn’t because it was a PG romance (I don’t mind those), it was that it took the whole book, and I really didn’t get enough out of the development as I would have liked.  I felt a few butterflies and tingles, but again…it wasn’t until 80-90% before anything really happened there.  And since I wasn’t really enjoying Jess’s individual development, I just didn’t get enough out of this book.

So yeah.  3 stars isn’t a horrible book.  I was entertained.  I was just ultimately unfulfilled.