This first book in Amy Spalding’s Out in Hollywood series was my first lesbian romance and I honestly had no idea what to expect, but it was smart and I loved the characters—so I loved the book. 

Setup

The single POV character, Nina, went through a breakup three years earlier that completely destroyed her confidence in herself as a romantic partner or friend. It didn’t compromise her confidence in her body image or make her experience impostor syndrome at work, but she thought she shouldn’t burden people with a relationship with her. She pulled back from her friend group and isolated herself in the northern suburbs of LA, her only social life a weekly lunch with her great aunt.

She enjoys her job as a communications specialist (my guess at a job title) for a talent agency—basically, she manages client celebrities’ email accounts. She also loves her lunches with her great aunt and her friends at a lively retirement community. The woman is really the only family she has a strong connection with, and the rest of her family is back in the midwest. So her life is simple and a little lonely, though she’s loathe to complain, thinking she’s doing the world a favor by avoiding relationships. She’s not above an occasional hookup, but that’s her life. 

A Difficult Client

One of the clients’ that Nina works on is Ari, an up-and-coming lesbian movie star who is adored by the LGBTQ community in general, but especially by Nina in particular. But obviously Nina can only dream from behind the computer screen.

Until Ari complains about Nina emails. At first she’s panicked about the quality of her work, but then it gets a little out of the ordinary when Ari wants to meet her to talk about the emails. Nina’s boss arranges it and the three of them meet.

How to Improve Email Quality

Ari wants to meet up with Nina some more to somehow improve the emails by getting to know each other a little. Nina goes along with this, her crush annoying and distracting as Ari keeps inviting her to hang out. Nina isn’t sure what to think, but goes along with it because it turns out she genuinely likes Ari as a real person, too. 

But then it turns out that Ari is actually interested in more, and Nina is shocked but immediately all in. Ari is really supportive of Nina’s budding career as a TV writer that has been on hold. She does actually start writing again but her confidence in her writing is still low (like most beginning writers—and honestly a lot of experienced writers, too :)). On top of Ari now being in her life, Nina reconnects with her old friend group, which takes her back in like she’d never abandoned them. 

Things are really good for a while, but soon Ari is too supportive of Nina’s writing, and causes a problem. There are some other miscommunications and imperfect actions, and soon the rift seems unfixable. Nina is of course bereft, but she knew it would happen since she’d ruin any relationship. She even tries to disengage from her friends again, but this time they won’t let her. 

But we all know this is a romance, so of course things turn around. But how? You’ll have to read it for that. 

Conclusion

This is a fun and uplifting story of love and friendships, almost completely devoid of men, which is interesting. If you read romances for the better-than-life men, you should probably skip this one. But otherwise, check it out. The next in the series comes out late February and I’m already looking forward to that.