All I knew about Kacen Callender’s Stars in Your Eyes when I picked it up for review was that it’s a celebrity fake-dating romance between a troubled bad-boy actor and his more likeable, sunny-natured co-star. Having enjoyed Ava Wilder’s How to Fake it in Hollywood – a deeply emotional, character-driven romance featuring complex, flawed but likeable characters – I’d hoped to find more of the same in Stars in Your Eyes, but unfortunately, the similarities between the two novels begin and end with the use of the celebrity fake dating trope.

Former child star Logan Gray has been acting since he was seven-years-old. Hugely talented – and hugely fucked up – he’s the quintessential Hollywood bad boy, complete with sex tapes on the internet, a drug and alcohol habit (he’s been to rehab twice), and a terrible attitude; he’s rude, he’s mean and basically doesn’t give a shit about anyone or anything, and his career is on the verge of tanking. His role as the lead character in the queer romcom Write Anything is the last ditch effort to save his career – although really, he’s not sure he wants to save it. But acting is all he’s ever known and he isn’t ready to think about what it would mean for him to leave it all behind.

Mattie Cole has always dreamed of being an actor, and is excited at being cast in his first big role – opposite Logan Gray, no less. That Logan badmouthed him in an interview just a few weeks before rehearsals are due to begin (calling him talentless) rankles, of course, but Mattie tries hard to get past it and focus on the job at hand. It’s not made any easier when Logan is no more pleasant to him to his face.

Another scandal before filming begins has the movie execs leaping into damage limitation mode. There are already calls for Logan to be dropped from the project and concerns that Write Anything is becoming a joke, so they come up with the idea that Logan and Mattie should pretend to be a couple. The public loves Mattie – he’s cute and has that “Southern charm thing going on” and the PR team think Logan ‘dating’ him will show the public that Logan is changing his ways. Mattie’s agent points out that it could go the other way, that Logan’s image will taint the public’s view of Mattie – but in the end, Mattie agrees to go along with it. This film is important to his career, and without Logan on board, it might not happen.

The plot progresses fairly predictably, but the romance happens very quickly and there’s little real chemistry between Logan and Mattie; even when we do get to see them spending time together and getting to know each other (and even though they do have sex) there’s no real sense of attraction or emotional connection between them. There are reasons for that – Logan has serious mental health issues (the book has TWs for childhood sexual abuse among other things) and spends the majority of the book trying to numb himself to them by being the selfish arsehole so many people believe him to be, because it’s one of his coping mechanisms (drugs, booze and meaningless sex being the others). So it didn’t really dawn on me until I was over half way through that this is yet another of those books that is being marketed as a romance when it isn’t one. The blurb promises a beautifully tender story of two grumpy/sunshine, fake-dating actors navigating their love story both on and offscreen and says they must fight for their relationship and their love – but what this book actually is, is a story about two young men who have experienced differing degrees of trauma, trying to come to terms with it – or not, in Logan’s case – while working in an incredibly demanding industry and being in a media goldfish bowl where their lives are not their own. The story deals with some very difficult subjects in a respectful and sensitive way, and when the extent of what Logan has been through is revealed, it’s horrifying. It’s clear from the beginning that he has some serious issues, that he has pretty much bought into the public’s view of him as a truly unpleasant, despicable person, and doesn’t believe someone as disgusting as he is deserves any sympathy or to be given the benefit of the doubt. People want the bad boy, they love to believe that’s who he is, so that’s who he gives them.

Mattie realises quite quickly that there’s more to Logan than meets the eye, and that no-one around him has ever bothered to ask if he’s okay. Although Logan is often just as shitty to him as he is to everyone else, Mattie genuinely does want to help him, to be there for him and to support him. But it’s hard to do that with someone who doesn’t want to be helped or won’t take that first step to help themselves. And while Logan does, deep down, know he needs help, his demons keep telling him he’s such a piece of shit, he doesn’t deserve it.

My problem with Stars in Your Eyes isn’t really with the story – because despite the lacklustre romance, it does pack an emotional punch – it’s with the execution. Kacen Callender is a new-to-me author who has written a number of books for children and young adults, and this is billed as his first adult story – but honestly, it feels very YA, despite the ages of the leads (early twenties) and the presence of a few sex scenes. It’s very… earnest, and, dare I say, preachy at times, and everything – thoughts, feelings and motivations – is explained to death. Most of the dialogue between Logan and Mattie doesn’t sound like the sort of thing anyone would actually say outside a therapist’s office – it’s clinical and kind of ‘therapy-speak’ – and at other times it’s very simplistic.

The characterisation isn’t great, either. While I absolutely understand why Logan is the way he is, and why he’s allowed himself to absorb so much negativity, it seems as though that is his entire personality. And Mattie, while sweet, is just too good to be true. He has issues of his own he’s not dealing with; he comes from a very traditional Black Christian family in Georgia, and his father has never accepted that Mattie is gay. Even years after he came out and although he’s had plenty of sex with men, Mattie is still not able to let go of the shame and internalised homophobia his father’s attitude towards him has fostered, and he knows that his desire for perfection stems from his need to prove he’s worthy of love. I did enjoy watching him working through it all and finding himself by the end of the book, seeing the transition between the fresh-faced newcomer and the more settled individual who has grown into the man he’s supposed to be.

I also had a problem with the structure. On the one hand, I liked that the author has incorporated things like vlog scripts, therapy notes, blog articles, social media posts, interviews and some truly dreadful-on-purpose RPF fanfic – but the downside to that is that it makes for a choppy read, especially in the first half of the book, when I was just getting to know the characters and their situation. The chapters are fairly short anyway, and the constant interruptions were frustrating.

There is also one really strange storytelling decision at the seventy-five percent mark that I’m going to put under a spoiler tag:

And the ending is rushed. There are big time jumps and it’s all telling rather than showing and feels almost as though the HEA is there only because it’s needed for it to fit the genre expectations.

Ultimately, Stars in Your Eyes is a hard book to rate. I hesitate to recommend it to romance readers because it really isn’t one – it’s stuck in that same limbo that so many m/f romances are in right now, of being a mix of romance and women’s fiction which doesn’t quite work for either audience (too much romance for some, too little for others). As a look at the way Hollywood chews people up and spits them out, at the way media and social media is so intrusive, and an exploration of response to trauma, it has some very pertinent things to say. But neither the romance nor the execution worked for me, so I’m going with a middling grade.

Note: This book contains references to childhood sexual abuse, drug use, suicidal ideation, and one scene of attempted sexual assault. (Full list of TWs can be found using Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature.)