Starry-Eyed Love by Helena Hunting
💜 COMING MAY 10TH 💜
This is the spark I’ve been missing all along. And now that I’ve found it, I want to
nurture it and turn it into a flame that will never extinguish.
Having just broken up with her boyfriend, London Spark is not in the mood to be hit on. Especially not when she’s out celebrating her single status with her sisters. So when a very attractive man pays for their drinks and then slips her his number, she passes it right back to him with a ‘thanks, but no thanks’. As the business administrator for their family’s event hotel, the Spark House, London has more important things to worry about, like bringing in new clientele.
As luck would have it, a multi-million-dollar company calls a few months later asking for a meeting to discuss a potential partnership, and London is eager to prove to her sisters, and herself, that she can land this deal. Just when she thinks she has nailed her presentation, the company’s CEO, Jackson Holt, walks in and inserts himself into the meeting. Not only that, but he also happens to be the same guy she turned down at the bar a few months ago.
As they begin to spend more time together, their working relationship blossoms into something more. It isn’t until their professional entanglements are finally over, that London and Jackson are finally ready to take the next step in their relationship. But between Jackson’s secretive past and London’s struggle with her sisters, London must question where she really stands – not just with Jackson, but with the Spark House, too.
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Starry-Eyed Love by Helena Hunting
No Sparks Between Characters
My rating: 3 Stars
There’s a stiffness and formality to the way the protagonists interact which left this romance feeling somewhat bloodless.
In “Starry-Eyed Love”, London Sparks is out with her sisters at a bar celebrating the end of her last relationship which had fizzled out.
“Like a fire made with wet wood, I could never find that spark people talked about. “
At the bar a good looking man ends up buying their drinks for them and approaching London for a date but she turns him down.
A few months later, Holt Media expresses an interest in working with Spark House, the sisters’ event company. It turns out that the CEO, Jackson, is the guy who asked London out. Jackson is interested in London but as they are now working together, he can’t ask her out again (for the time being).
London gets very confused by Jackson while they work together as she feels he’s sending mixed signals. She’s attracted to him but gets flustered around him often.
Despite their stated attraction to each other, the relationship between London and Jackson seemed a touch stiff and formal to me at least for the first half of the book.
There’s a flicker of evidence that they like each other after the midway mark of the book but it felt like a little too late for me.
It’s not that this is a slow burn romance, it’s just that it doesn’t even seem to be a factor until more than half-way through the book. It isn’t until 62% of the way into the book that they have their first kiss. Their formality with one another makes the relationship seem a little anemic, unfortunately.
I did enjoy the drama of the last 40% of the book as their relationship and London’s relationships with her sister face challenges but once again the stiffness with which emotions are expressed took away from the overall effect.
Readers should definitely come to their own conclusions, but for me, “Starry-Eyed Love” didn’t have the spark that London is looking for in its pages.
Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for providing me with a review copy of this romance. This is my honest review.
For another book by Helena Hunting, check out my Love on the Lake review.
To see what else is releasing in May, click here for my list of May 2022 Romance Book Releases.