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Heartthrob
NO WOMAN COULD RESIST HIM . . .
Once voted the "Sexiest Man Alive," Jericho Beaumont had dominated the box office before his fall from grace. Now poised for a comeback, he wants the role of Laramie bad enough to sign an outrageous contract with top producer Kate O'Laughlin--one that gives her the authority to supervise JB's every move, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
ESPECIALLY THE ONE WITH THE MOST AT STAKE . . .
The last thing Kate wants to do is baby-sit her leading man, and Jericho Beaumont may be more than she can handle. A player in every sense of the word, he is an actor of incredible talent--and a man with a darkly haunted past. Despite her better judgment, Kate's attraction flares into explosive passion, and she is falling fast. But is she being charmed by the real Jericho or the superstar who dazzles the world?
Once voted the "Sexiest Man Alive," Jericho Beaumont had dominated the box office before his fall from grace. Now poised for a comeback, he wants the role of Laramie bad enough to sign an outrageous contract with top producer Kate O'Laughlin--one that gives her the authority to supervise JB's every move, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
ESPECIALLY THE ONE WITH THE MOST AT STAKE . . .
The last thing Kate wants to do is baby-sit her leading man, and Jericho Beaumont may be more than she can handle. A player in every sense of the word, he is an actor of incredible talent--and a man with a darkly haunted past. Despite her better judgment, Kate's attraction flares into explosive passion, and she is falling fast. But is she being charmed by the real Jericho or the superstar who dazzles the world?
344 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published March 1, 1999
28 people are currently reading
856 people want to read
About the author
Suzanne Brockmann
253 books3,568 followersAfter childhood plans to become the captain of a starship didn’t pan out, Suzanne Brockmann took her fascination with military history, her respect for the men and women who serve, her reverence for diversity, and her love of storytelling, and explored brave new worlds as a bestselling romance author.
Over the past thirty years she has written sixty-three novels, including her award-winning Troubleshooters series about Navy SEAL heroes and the women—and sometimes men—who win their hearts. Her personal favorite is the one where her most popular character, gay FBI agent Jules Cassidy, wins his happily-ever-after and marries the man of his dreams. Called All Through the Night, this mainstream romance novel with a hero and a hero hit the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list. In 2007, Suz donated all of her earnings from this book, in perpetuity, to MassEquality, to help win and preserve equal marriage rights in Massachusetts.
In addition to writing books, Suz writes and produces indie movies and TV including the award-winning romantic comedy The Perfect Wedding. Her recent feature, Out of Body, is streaming on Amazon Prime.
In 2018, Suz was given the Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award from the Romance Writers of America. Her latest projects are Blame It on Rio (Tall, Dark & Dangerous # 14), available in print and e-book from Suzanne Brockmann Books, and Marriage of Inconvenience, a six-episode LBGTQ rom-com TV series, streaming on Dekkoo in April 2023.
Over the past thirty years she has written sixty-three novels, including her award-winning Troubleshooters series about Navy SEAL heroes and the women—and sometimes men—who win their hearts. Her personal favorite is the one where her most popular character, gay FBI agent Jules Cassidy, wins his happily-ever-after and marries the man of his dreams. Called All Through the Night, this mainstream romance novel with a hero and a hero hit the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list. In 2007, Suz donated all of her earnings from this book, in perpetuity, to MassEquality, to help win and preserve equal marriage rights in Massachusetts.
In addition to writing books, Suz writes and produces indie movies and TV including the award-winning romantic comedy The Perfect Wedding. Her recent feature, Out of Body, is streaming on Amazon Prime.
In 2018, Suz was given the Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award from the Romance Writers of America. Her latest projects are Blame It on Rio (Tall, Dark & Dangerous # 14), available in print and e-book from Suzanne Brockmann Books, and Marriage of Inconvenience, a six-episode LBGTQ rom-com TV series, streaming on Dekkoo in April 2023.
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June 22, 2025Okay, I tell the same joke more than once, that’s a theme, right? In which case I’ll begin by saying that if Heartthrob was a person, it would be, like Mark Harmon or something?
By which I mean, what we’re looking at here is a venerable silverfox of a book, eminently bangable, but, y’know, of a certain age, and showing it just a little bit. Even though I completely loved it, in some ways I found Heartthrob slightly harder to get to grips with than some of the older-schooler (yes, that’s technical vocabulary) romances I’ve read because, as far as I’m concerned, the 1970s were a bad hair day that happened to some other people, but I was around in the late 90s, I didn’t like them very much and I wish they were further away.
At least when you read The Flame & The Flower you can celebrate the fact that heroines are now allowed to enjoy sex without being raped, and, if you’re into rape fantasies, you can get those too, and that’s all cool. Unfortunately Heartthrob just takes me back to a time when Dead Of AIDS was the only permissible role for a fictional gay dude and the only way to discuss racism without causing a riot was to make it a problem for enlightened white people. And, although I think I should probably try to feel happier that there has been some degree of progress on both counts, mainly I just get a bit depressed that there hasn’t been more.
I should also emphasise that this isn’t a criticism of Heartthrob, which is deeply delightful in very many ways, but it reads to me like a book that isn’t so much a product of its time, as straight-jacketed by it. On the other hand, it’s also one of the few romances I’ve read (The Iron Duke being another) that seems to genuinely care that the world is not solely populated by straight, white, middle class people. And I don’t mean to be sanctimonious about it – after all, I’m a white middle class dude, what the hell do I know? – but it’s honestly just nice.
Right, the plot: Jed (Jericho) Beaumont is a superhot movie star with a serious substance addiction problem. Despite having been clean for five years, the parts aren’t coming in, and he’s desperate for the leading role in a film called The Promise. The producer (and, we later learn, screenwriter) is Kate O’Laughlin, who has spent the past decade spinning a fortune out of her parent’s stationery business after a short-lived film career in various low budget sexploitation horror movies. Of course, Jed lands the part, but only if he agrees to 24 hour supervision and regular drug and alcohol tests. They make a movie. Loads and loads of other stuff happens, and keeps happening. Somewhere in the middle of it all, they fall in love. The end.
Heartthrob was a slow burner for me, although that’s probably just because I’m emotionally repressed and clueless. I enjoyed reading it at the time, but it wasn’t until I sat down to write this review that I really realised how much it had affected me, and how deeply I felt about it. I mean, I’ve got my gripes too, but they’re either minor (wow is this plot labyrinthine, Daedalus) or more generally directed at the 90s (frustrations related to the social constructions of gay people and people of colour), but none of that really detracted from the quality of the book itself.
So, to start, for a book with an incredibly gripping opening and an equally absorbing second half, Heartthrob actually takes a little while to get itself going. There are a lot of characters, a lot of connections and lot of motivations to establish, and so the beginning feels slow, unwieldy and expositive, at least in comparison to the pacing of later chapters. The situation that forces Kate’s hand into casting drunken has-been Jed Beaumont in the lead role of her movie looks something like this: Victor, the director, wants to cast Jed; Jamal, the hot black actor, wants to work with Susie; and Susie, the all American dream girl, also wants to work with Jed, so Kate has to give him the job, even though she and the financial backers think he’s a total liability. I’m sure this is probably a pretty accurate representation of the way Hollywood actually works, but it felt like that logic game where you have a fox, a chicken, and a bag of grain to get across the river. And I know it’s just set-up to get Kate and Jed together on a movie set, but it just felt a little bit too transparently like set up for me – a way to manipulate Kate into acting against her character, and her better judgement, because if she doesn’t there would be no plot, no love story, and no book.
There are a couple of such moments across the frankly complicated action of Heartthrob. For example, at one point Kate accidentally takes LSD and, although this makes a degree of sense in context, it also seems a way to force Jed and Kate to trust each other again, after he’s seriously goofed it up. And, while it was important to see Jed showing his good side, it still felt like an external solution to an internal problem. After all, trust isn’t, um, cumulative. You can’t balance a betrayal by being really nice afterwards. But, on the other hand, there’s such a lot of depth to the relationship between Jed and Kate, and it develops so intricately over the course of the book, that the LSD stuff basically works – I just felt it was another occasion on which Kate’s strength of character (which I admired) had to be awkwardly circumvented to further the plot.
I also felt a bit bad for how many people had to die for Jed’s emotional growth – there’s Dead Of AIDS Tom (who, to give him credit, really comes through the text as a real person, with a personality and a life, which is why I was so depressed he was Dead Of AIDS) and, later, Jed’s best friend David gets randomly killed while doing A Good Deed at a prison. I know the point of David’s death was that it was supposed to be random and arbitrary, because death so often is, but I still kinda felt Jed needed to come with some kind of public health and safety warning: don’t be emotionally significant to me, you’ll die.
And, finally, I felt slightly awkward about The Promise, the fictional movie. As far as I can tell, it seems to be a story about how some nice white people save some black people from some bad white people, and also how slavery is bad, by the way. Apart from Jamal, the young black actor they’ve brought in to play Moses the rebellious slave, it’s an incredibly white-centric undertaking. And I don’t know how much that’s, well, a problem. After all, educating white people to be less crappy white people is the responsibility of white people, not people of colour. But equally I’m sort of nebulously bothered by how often stories about slavery focus on everybody except the, um, slaves. Like, there’s a bit near the end, where Moses has been recaptured and the rest of characters are really really upset about it:
The thing is … that dude is literally in chains, guys. I understand that slavery is negative across the board and that there are times when it feels like the lives we live are not our own … but that dude is literally in chains. This is not the time for metaphor.
But, you know, I’m essentially wringing my little white hands over a secondary text here, a secondary text, I’ve more or less invented in my head, based on the way well-meaning Hollywood films on these sort of subjects tend to go. But it felt a little bit odd, and not entirely comfortable, to squint back on the frustratingly limited ways you were allowed to talk about race in the 90s. There’s a bit right in the middle of the novel where they go on a tour of a plantation house, and see the slave quarters, and it’s really vividly written, and utterly horrific. Except, there’s this very long discussion where Jed takes a time out to explain to Jamal just how hideously shitty it was to be a slave, and Jamal responds as follows:
Most charitably, this is an experienced actor helping a less inexperienced actor to find his way into a part. Less charitably, this is a white guy helping a black guy deepen his understanding of slavery. Um. On the other hand, I liked how resistant Jamal is to playing a slave, and how bewildered and angry it makes him, even though he recognises it’s a career-defining part for him. Because, when you get right down to it, assuming that a black actor can instinctively get a grip on the role of a slave, is just as absurd as assuming he knows how to rap. Also Jamal read, to me, like a very typical eighteen year old – it makes sense, and hell, it’s probably right, that’s he has absolutely no interest in slavery.
At the risk of sounding like I’m trying to get my GCSE in Romance Reading, Heartthrob has many themes. As seems only fitting for a book set largely on a Hollywood film set, it’s deeply preoccupied with the gaps between appearance and reality, the extent to which we’re helplessly defined by where we come from and how the world perceives us, and the ways we find the truth of ourselves between the roles we play. So there’s Jed, trapped between his past and his addictions, always craving his next drink, full of pain and anger, and so terrified of turning into his abusive father he hardly dares to feel anything at all. And then there’s Kate, who has been treated as a sexual object for about as long as she can remember, desperately trying to find a way to inhabit her own body without losing herself. Jamal, of course, is simply trying to grow up and find a role for himself that isn’t defined or limited by the colour of his skin. And Susie is in a very similar position, trying to find, at the age of fifteen, a balance between professional integrity and pragmatism, while the adults in her life use her as means to navigate their own insecurities and disappointments. There are, of course, no simple answers here and, Heartthrob, to its credit, doesn’t try to provide any – unless, perhaps, the possibility that, when we fall in love, we are able to be our best, worst and truest selves. Excuse me, I need to go and do some manly sobbing in the corner.
Okay, I’m all right. Let’s pretend that didn’t happen. I should say that, despite the fact I’ve probably made it sound like one, Heartthrob is not a woe parade. It races along at a fair pace, and is full of wit, charm and incident. Also at one point Jed gets handcuffed naked to a bed in a scene I felt bad for finding as inappropriately interesting as I did. The thing is, even when reality seems quite irredeemably bleak, hope is never too far away, and Brockmann has a wonderful way of presenting people and situations in all their occasionally paradoxical complexity. After all the things that break us are often the things that make us. Jed’s upbringing is, undeniably, terrible but it still drives him to be the man he becomes, and his fear of turning into his father is simultaneously the thing that leads him to lock away his feelings and the thing that leads him to seek help for his addictions. Kate’s relationship with her body is just as complicated and I’m wary of over-simplifying it, but I genuinely got the feeling that she had found a place where her beauty and her sexuality could be a source of strength and pleasure to her, rather than assets to be exploited by others. As for Susie and Jamal, they get to do a little piece of their growing up together.
And then, of course, you have Hollywood itself. I confess I don’t pay much attention to what’s going on behind the bright lights but most of the portrayals of Hollywood I’ve encountered have tended to either fall neatly into either omg!awesome or omg!evil. What I really appreciated about Heart Throb was its ability to encompass a range of ambiguities and compromises. There’s no denying the abstract machine of Hollywood is exploitative and harmful – everybody caught up in it, Jamal, Susie, Kate, and Jed, are, to a degree, damaged by it. But, once again, this isn’t the end of the story: it set Jed on a path to addiction and destruction, but it also set him free of his family, it defines Jamal solely by the colour of his skin and Susie by the colour of her hair, but there is hope of more for both of them. And Kate is able to put her short-lived career as slasher movie eye candy aside to write, and produce, The Promise, which is clearly a labour of love and, regardless of my personal uncertainties about it, a meaningful and powerful film that will affect the thinking of a lot of people. Most of the individuals we encounter actually involved in the day-to-day business making of movies seem to act with genuine integrity, passion and commitment, even those who seem the most obviously stereotypical, like Victor, the libidinous director.
There’s an interesting moment somewhere in the middle of the book where Victor hires an actress to play a bit part based solely on the fact he wants to sleep with her. But, actually, she turns out to be perfectly competent and Kate admits that she couldn’t have made a better choice. I just thought this was a really intriguing portrayal of the ambiguities of the creative environment, and the way private, public and artistic goals intersect. As far as I’m aware, the way this story usually plays out is that when you hire an actress you want to bonk, she’s hilariously terrible which, now I think about it, is pretty damn insulting, since being sexually desirable is in no way the opposite of being competent, and this is precisely what Kate has spent her entire life struggling against. Heartthrob is full of tiny little incidents like this, and they come together, reflecting upon and contrasting against each other, to form an incredibly rich and complicated book.
Gosh, I’m probably going to have to stop talking about Heartthrob at some point. I just really liked it, and I liked everyone in it. Kate, of course, is excellent. She’s strong, and stubborn, and sexy and – again, this is way above my pay grade – but it seemed to me her issues with her body and her sexual choices were really deftly portrayed. This sounds like a weird thing to say, but I just liked how hurt and miserable she was about the way the world kept treating her like public property simply because she was beautiful. Obviously, I have no experience of what this would be like and I don’t mean to reductively compare it to minor things that have happened to me – but I do know what it’s like to walk down the street and have a random stranger, with no knowledge of me whatsoever, yell out something personal or insulting or just none of their goddamn business. And I think one of the problems associated with this behaviour is that fiction persistently wants you to believe you can in some way be totally empowered and kick arse about it. But, actually, you don’t feel strong and outraged, you mainly feel weak and outraged, and like there’s nothing you can do. Because, frankly, there isn’t. You can’t even confront these people because you’re not really confronting an individual, you’re dealing with the entire abstract monster of cultural policing, which insists that if you in some way deviate from the perceived norm – by being beautiful, by being queer, by being non-white, by wearing the wrong clothes, by being the wrong shape – you lose the right to move through the world without public scrutiny and comment. There’s no way to fight this, and there’s no way to come away from it feeling anything other than rubbish.
And Kate has really suffered because of it. There’s a bit where Jed is blatantly objectifying her (staring at her breasts when she’s trying to talk to him) and she nearly cries. And when I write it down, it sounds like the sort of thing that might make you judge a character for being weak. But Kate isn’t weak. Not remotely. In the scene, she’s frustrated with herself not being able to handle it “better” but that’s the whole point, isn’t it? She shouldn’t have to handle it at all. Perhaps it’s a little grim but I just found it really refreshing to see an author confront head on the unspeakable truth that being disempowered just makes you feel disempowered. It isn’t a source of secret strength, and the only real way to deal with it is to just keep living, find some way to be yourself, do what you want to do, and try to be happy. Which is what Kate is essentially doing. Spectacularly.
As for Jed, the truth is, for one reason and another, I over-identified with the dude like you wouldn’t believe. Oh all right, you guessed it: I was recently voted World’s Sexiest [Errr – best typo ever – I’d originally written this as ‘sexist’ – something I don’t think they usually give awards for] Man by Time magazine. Well, maybe not. I can’t really believe I’m going to talk about this in public but here goes. When I was about sixteen, I’d occasionally fall into conversation with people I didn’t know, and I’d, well, I’d find myself coming up with a bunch of complete lies about who I was, and what I was doing. Nothing particularly outlandish, and I wasn’t trying to be malicious, but I wasn’t wildly happy at the time and I’d find a strange comfort in being someone else, even if only fleetingly in a stranger’s eyes. It sounds utterly deranged and, truthfully, it’s not something I’ve told anyone – precisely because it’s so damn odd. And now I’m telling the internet. Yay. I should also take this opportunity to mention that it was a brief, um, phase and I absolutely do not feel any need to do it anymore. I’m perfectly happy to be me. But you can probably imagine my surprise, and my strange joy, when, in the middle of Heartthrob, Jed confesses to having done something very similar when he was growing up.
I know this doesn’t tell you anything about Heartthrob, or if you should read it for yourself, but it just made me remember how absolutely bloody miraculous books can be sometimes. And the inexpressible, incalculable value of those tiny moments, probably completely meaningless to anyone else, that make your own little universe feel a little less odd, or a little less lonely. There’s a bit in The History Boys where Hector, talking to Posner I think, says:
The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.
And, for me, this was just like that. And it was perfect. That is all.
Everything I learned about life and love from reading Heartthrob: I’m not as weird
By which I mean, what we’re looking at here is a venerable silverfox of a book, eminently bangable, but, y’know, of a certain age, and showing it just a little bit. Even though I completely loved it, in some ways I found Heartthrob slightly harder to get to grips with than some of the older-schooler (yes, that’s technical vocabulary) romances I’ve read because, as far as I’m concerned, the 1970s were a bad hair day that happened to some other people, but I was around in the late 90s, I didn’t like them very much and I wish they were further away.
At least when you read The Flame & The Flower you can celebrate the fact that heroines are now allowed to enjoy sex without being raped, and, if you’re into rape fantasies, you can get those too, and that’s all cool. Unfortunately Heartthrob just takes me back to a time when Dead Of AIDS was the only permissible role for a fictional gay dude and the only way to discuss racism without causing a riot was to make it a problem for enlightened white people. And, although I think I should probably try to feel happier that there has been some degree of progress on both counts, mainly I just get a bit depressed that there hasn’t been more.
I should also emphasise that this isn’t a criticism of Heartthrob, which is deeply delightful in very many ways, but it reads to me like a book that isn’t so much a product of its time, as straight-jacketed by it. On the other hand, it’s also one of the few romances I’ve read (The Iron Duke being another) that seems to genuinely care that the world is not solely populated by straight, white, middle class people. And I don’t mean to be sanctimonious about it – after all, I’m a white middle class dude, what the hell do I know? – but it’s honestly just nice.
Right, the plot: Jed (Jericho) Beaumont is a superhot movie star with a serious substance addiction problem. Despite having been clean for five years, the parts aren’t coming in, and he’s desperate for the leading role in a film called The Promise. The producer (and, we later learn, screenwriter) is Kate O’Laughlin, who has spent the past decade spinning a fortune out of her parent’s stationery business after a short-lived film career in various low budget sexploitation horror movies. Of course, Jed lands the part, but only if he agrees to 24 hour supervision and regular drug and alcohol tests. They make a movie. Loads and loads of other stuff happens, and keeps happening. Somewhere in the middle of it all, they fall in love. The end.
Heartthrob was a slow burner for me, although that’s probably just because I’m emotionally repressed and clueless. I enjoyed reading it at the time, but it wasn’t until I sat down to write this review that I really realised how much it had affected me, and how deeply I felt about it. I mean, I’ve got my gripes too, but they’re either minor (wow is this plot labyrinthine, Daedalus) or more generally directed at the 90s (frustrations related to the social constructions of gay people and people of colour), but none of that really detracted from the quality of the book itself.
So, to start, for a book with an incredibly gripping opening and an equally absorbing second half, Heartthrob actually takes a little while to get itself going. There are a lot of characters, a lot of connections and lot of motivations to establish, and so the beginning feels slow, unwieldy and expositive, at least in comparison to the pacing of later chapters. The situation that forces Kate’s hand into casting drunken has-been Jed Beaumont in the lead role of her movie looks something like this: Victor, the director, wants to cast Jed; Jamal, the hot black actor, wants to work with Susie; and Susie, the all American dream girl, also wants to work with Jed, so Kate has to give him the job, even though she and the financial backers think he’s a total liability. I’m sure this is probably a pretty accurate representation of the way Hollywood actually works, but it felt like that logic game where you have a fox, a chicken, and a bag of grain to get across the river. And I know it’s just set-up to get Kate and Jed together on a movie set, but it just felt a little bit too transparently like set up for me – a way to manipulate Kate into acting against her character, and her better judgement, because if she doesn’t there would be no plot, no love story, and no book.
There are a couple of such moments across the frankly complicated action of Heartthrob. For example, at one point Kate accidentally takes LSD and, although this makes a degree of sense in context, it also seems a way to force Jed and Kate to trust each other again, after he’s seriously goofed it up. And, while it was important to see Jed showing his good side, it still felt like an external solution to an internal problem. After all, trust isn’t, um, cumulative. You can’t balance a betrayal by being really nice afterwards. But, on the other hand, there’s such a lot of depth to the relationship between Jed and Kate, and it develops so intricately over the course of the book, that the LSD stuff basically works – I just felt it was another occasion on which Kate’s strength of character (which I admired) had to be awkwardly circumvented to further the plot.
I also felt a bit bad for how many people had to die for Jed’s emotional growth – there’s Dead Of AIDS Tom (who, to give him credit, really comes through the text as a real person, with a personality and a life, which is why I was so depressed he was Dead Of AIDS) and, later, Jed’s best friend David gets randomly killed while doing A Good Deed at a prison. I know the point of David’s death was that it was supposed to be random and arbitrary, because death so often is, but I still kinda felt Jed needed to come with some kind of public health and safety warning: don’t be emotionally significant to me, you’ll die.
And, finally, I felt slightly awkward about The Promise, the fictional movie. As far as I can tell, it seems to be a story about how some nice white people save some black people from some bad white people, and also how slavery is bad, by the way. Apart from Jamal, the young black actor they’ve brought in to play Moses the rebellious slave, it’s an incredibly white-centric undertaking. And I don’t know how much that’s, well, a problem. After all, educating white people to be less crappy white people is the responsibility of white people, not people of colour. But equally I’m sort of nebulously bothered by how often stories about slavery focus on everybody except the, um, slaves. Like, there’s a bit near the end, where Moses has been recaptured and the rest of characters are really really upset about it:
Both Jane and Laramie were to look at Moses standing there, and see their own lives wrapped in figurative chains.
The thing is … that dude is literally in chains, guys. I understand that slavery is negative across the board and that there are times when it feels like the lives we live are not our own … but that dude is literally in chains. This is not the time for metaphor.
But, you know, I’m essentially wringing my little white hands over a secondary text here, a secondary text, I’ve more or less invented in my head, based on the way well-meaning Hollywood films on these sort of subjects tend to go. But it felt a little bit odd, and not entirely comfortable, to squint back on the frustratingly limited ways you were allowed to talk about race in the 90s. There’s a bit right in the middle of the novel where they go on a tour of a plantation house, and see the slave quarters, and it’s really vividly written, and utterly horrific. Except, there’s this very long discussion where Jed takes a time out to explain to Jamal just how hideously shitty it was to be a slave, and Jamal responds as follows:
Jamaal looked up at him, understanding finally glistening in his eyes. “Shit.”
Most charitably, this is an experienced actor helping a less inexperienced actor to find his way into a part. Less charitably, this is a white guy helping a black guy deepen his understanding of slavery. Um. On the other hand, I liked how resistant Jamal is to playing a slave, and how bewildered and angry it makes him, even though he recognises it’s a career-defining part for him. Because, when you get right down to it, assuming that a black actor can instinctively get a grip on the role of a slave, is just as absurd as assuming he knows how to rap. Also Jamal read, to me, like a very typical eighteen year old – it makes sense, and hell, it’s probably right, that’s he has absolutely no interest in slavery.
At the risk of sounding like I’m trying to get my GCSE in Romance Reading, Heartthrob has many themes. As seems only fitting for a book set largely on a Hollywood film set, it’s deeply preoccupied with the gaps between appearance and reality, the extent to which we’re helplessly defined by where we come from and how the world perceives us, and the ways we find the truth of ourselves between the roles we play. So there’s Jed, trapped between his past and his addictions, always craving his next drink, full of pain and anger, and so terrified of turning into his abusive father he hardly dares to feel anything at all. And then there’s Kate, who has been treated as a sexual object for about as long as she can remember, desperately trying to find a way to inhabit her own body without losing herself. Jamal, of course, is simply trying to grow up and find a role for himself that isn’t defined or limited by the colour of his skin. And Susie is in a very similar position, trying to find, at the age of fifteen, a balance between professional integrity and pragmatism, while the adults in her life use her as means to navigate their own insecurities and disappointments. There are, of course, no simple answers here and, Heartthrob, to its credit, doesn’t try to provide any – unless, perhaps, the possibility that, when we fall in love, we are able to be our best, worst and truest selves. Excuse me, I need to go and do some manly sobbing in the corner.
Okay, I’m all right. Let’s pretend that didn’t happen. I should say that, despite the fact I’ve probably made it sound like one, Heartthrob is not a woe parade. It races along at a fair pace, and is full of wit, charm and incident. Also at one point Jed gets handcuffed naked to a bed in a scene I felt bad for finding as inappropriately interesting as I did. The thing is, even when reality seems quite irredeemably bleak, hope is never too far away, and Brockmann has a wonderful way of presenting people and situations in all their occasionally paradoxical complexity. After all the things that break us are often the things that make us. Jed’s upbringing is, undeniably, terrible but it still drives him to be the man he becomes, and his fear of turning into his father is simultaneously the thing that leads him to lock away his feelings and the thing that leads him to seek help for his addictions. Kate’s relationship with her body is just as complicated and I’m wary of over-simplifying it, but I genuinely got the feeling that she had found a place where her beauty and her sexuality could be a source of strength and pleasure to her, rather than assets to be exploited by others. As for Susie and Jamal, they get to do a little piece of their growing up together.
And then, of course, you have Hollywood itself. I confess I don’t pay much attention to what’s going on behind the bright lights but most of the portrayals of Hollywood I’ve encountered have tended to either fall neatly into either omg!awesome or omg!evil. What I really appreciated about Heart Throb was its ability to encompass a range of ambiguities and compromises. There’s no denying the abstract machine of Hollywood is exploitative and harmful – everybody caught up in it, Jamal, Susie, Kate, and Jed, are, to a degree, damaged by it. But, once again, this isn’t the end of the story: it set Jed on a path to addiction and destruction, but it also set him free of his family, it defines Jamal solely by the colour of his skin and Susie by the colour of her hair, but there is hope of more for both of them. And Kate is able to put her short-lived career as slasher movie eye candy aside to write, and produce, The Promise, which is clearly a labour of love and, regardless of my personal uncertainties about it, a meaningful and powerful film that will affect the thinking of a lot of people. Most of the individuals we encounter actually involved in the day-to-day business making of movies seem to act with genuine integrity, passion and commitment, even those who seem the most obviously stereotypical, like Victor, the libidinous director.
There’s an interesting moment somewhere in the middle of the book where Victor hires an actress to play a bit part based solely on the fact he wants to sleep with her. But, actually, she turns out to be perfectly competent and Kate admits that she couldn’t have made a better choice. I just thought this was a really intriguing portrayal of the ambiguities of the creative environment, and the way private, public and artistic goals intersect. As far as I’m aware, the way this story usually plays out is that when you hire an actress you want to bonk, she’s hilariously terrible which, now I think about it, is pretty damn insulting, since being sexually desirable is in no way the opposite of being competent, and this is precisely what Kate has spent her entire life struggling against. Heartthrob is full of tiny little incidents like this, and they come together, reflecting upon and contrasting against each other, to form an incredibly rich and complicated book.
Gosh, I’m probably going to have to stop talking about Heartthrob at some point. I just really liked it, and I liked everyone in it. Kate, of course, is excellent. She’s strong, and stubborn, and sexy and – again, this is way above my pay grade – but it seemed to me her issues with her body and her sexual choices were really deftly portrayed. This sounds like a weird thing to say, but I just liked how hurt and miserable she was about the way the world kept treating her like public property simply because she was beautiful. Obviously, I have no experience of what this would be like and I don’t mean to reductively compare it to minor things that have happened to me – but I do know what it’s like to walk down the street and have a random stranger, with no knowledge of me whatsoever, yell out something personal or insulting or just none of their goddamn business. And I think one of the problems associated with this behaviour is that fiction persistently wants you to believe you can in some way be totally empowered and kick arse about it. But, actually, you don’t feel strong and outraged, you mainly feel weak and outraged, and like there’s nothing you can do. Because, frankly, there isn’t. You can’t even confront these people because you’re not really confronting an individual, you’re dealing with the entire abstract monster of cultural policing, which insists that if you in some way deviate from the perceived norm – by being beautiful, by being queer, by being non-white, by wearing the wrong clothes, by being the wrong shape – you lose the right to move through the world without public scrutiny and comment. There’s no way to fight this, and there’s no way to come away from it feeling anything other than rubbish.
And Kate has really suffered because of it. There’s a bit where Jed is blatantly objectifying her (staring at her breasts when she’s trying to talk to him) and she nearly cries. And when I write it down, it sounds like the sort of thing that might make you judge a character for being weak. But Kate isn’t weak. Not remotely. In the scene, she’s frustrated with herself not being able to handle it “better” but that’s the whole point, isn’t it? She shouldn’t have to handle it at all. Perhaps it’s a little grim but I just found it really refreshing to see an author confront head on the unspeakable truth that being disempowered just makes you feel disempowered. It isn’t a source of secret strength, and the only real way to deal with it is to just keep living, find some way to be yourself, do what you want to do, and try to be happy. Which is what Kate is essentially doing. Spectacularly.
As for Jed, the truth is, for one reason and another, I over-identified with the dude like you wouldn’t believe. Oh all right, you guessed it: I was recently voted World’s Sexiest [Errr – best typo ever – I’d originally written this as ‘sexist’ – something I don’t think they usually give awards for] Man by Time magazine. Well, maybe not. I can’t really believe I’m going to talk about this in public but here goes. When I was about sixteen, I’d occasionally fall into conversation with people I didn’t know, and I’d, well, I’d find myself coming up with a bunch of complete lies about who I was, and what I was doing. Nothing particularly outlandish, and I wasn’t trying to be malicious, but I wasn’t wildly happy at the time and I’d find a strange comfort in being someone else, even if only fleetingly in a stranger’s eyes. It sounds utterly deranged and, truthfully, it’s not something I’ve told anyone – precisely because it’s so damn odd. And now I’m telling the internet. Yay. I should also take this opportunity to mention that it was a brief, um, phase and I absolutely do not feel any need to do it anymore. I’m perfectly happy to be me. But you can probably imagine my surprise, and my strange joy, when, in the middle of Heartthrob, Jed confesses to having done something very similar when he was growing up.
I know this doesn’t tell you anything about Heartthrob, or if you should read it for yourself, but it just made me remember how absolutely bloody miraculous books can be sometimes. And the inexpressible, incalculable value of those tiny moments, probably completely meaningless to anyone else, that make your own little universe feel a little less odd, or a little less lonely. There’s a bit in The History Boys where Hector, talking to Posner I think, says:
The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out, and taken yours.
And, for me, this was just like that. And it was perfect. That is all.
Everything I learned about life and love from reading Heartthrob: I’m not as weird
July 4, 2015
When I first got my kindle I discovered so many new authors. Authors that were not available in paperback in Belgium or Ireland. Suzanne Brockmann was one such author. I devoured her books. I fell in love with Navy Seals. So much so that I am taking a trip to the USA this summer and one of my destinations will be Coronado Beach where the Seals train!!!
But this book has nothing to do with Navy Seals.
I must check out some other books by Ms Brockmann that I have not read.
Really liked both main characters and the secondary cast also.
Girls and Guys, we are having a heat weave here in Europe and I am literally melting so reviews will be kept to a minimum. This is coming from a girl originally from the West of Ireland, I am not able for the heat... I just rang my mother a moment ago. We are wilting here in Belgium while it is raining over there on the West Coast of Ireland ...
It touched on some fairly interesting topics.
I need a cold shower and it is not for the usual reasons that we take cold showers!!
But this book has nothing to do with Navy Seals.
Once voted the "Sexiest Man Alive," Jericho Beaumont had dominated the box office before his fall from grace. Now poised for a comeback, he wants the role of Laramie bad enough to sign an outrageous contract with top producer Kate O'Laughlin--one that gives her the authority to supervise JB's every move, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
I must check out some other books by Ms Brockmann that I have not read.
“Everything in my life has been leading up to this," he whispered. "Everything that's happened, everything I've done has been worth it because it's brought me here.”
"My name is Jed Beaumont ...
Really liked both main characters and the secondary cast also.
Girls and Guys, we are having a heat weave here in Europe and I am literally melting so reviews will be kept to a minimum. This is coming from a girl originally from the West of Ireland, I am not able for the heat... I just rang my mother a moment ago. We are wilting here in Belgium while it is raining over there on the West Coast of Ireland ...
It touched on some fairly interesting topics.
I need a cold shower and it is not for the usual reasons that we take cold showers!!
July 16, 2014
4.25 stars
Somehow, reading the blurb I thought this was going to be a light book. It wasn't. For its setting, it was surprisingly emotional and raw. Just to mention-I'm huge fan of the Troubleshooter series, but this book just GOT to me. Mostly 'cause of Jericho.
Jericho Beaumont has hit rock bottom 5 years ago and he just can't seem to find his way back to the top. This movie is the opportunity of a lifetime and he would do anything to play in this movie. Even surrender his privacy and pride by signing a contract that enables the producers to constantly watch him, control him, watch him for any hint of substance abuse...
"He forced his anger and his shame away, and made himself feel nothing as he signed both copies of the agreement, writing the date next to his name. He sensed Kate standing behind him, and as he put the pen down, he turned to her, not bothering to hide the emptiness in his eyes."
Jericho, aka Jed is an incredible character. He struggles every day to overcome his addiction. He has been through hell and his entire life he wanted just this-to be an actor. He's vulnerable, but used to keeping people away, by acting, playing the role of a laid back playboy. I loved him more than I can say, so kudos to Ms. Brockmann for writing such a deep, incredible character.
“You know, if you weren’t my producer, I’d tell you that for some people, the craving never goes away. It’s always back there, lurking, day after day. And if I really wanted to scare you to death, I might even tell you that there hasn’t been one single day in the past five years, four months, and twenty-two days, that I haven’t wished for a drink. And that’s why some very smart person made up that slogan, one day at a time. See, instead of saying that I’ve got to stay sober another five years— which sounds pretty impossible—all I have to do is make it through today. Hell, all I have to do is get through the next few hours without taking a drink. And then I have to get through the next few hours until another day is done. I can handle a few hours, and even if I can’t, I know I can handle a few minutes. And when you add all those minutes and hours together, presto change-o, what do you know? They become five years, four months, and twenty-two days. And you’ve got yourself a real life instead of a blur of binges and hangovers.”
“I learned to lie early.” Jericho’s soft southern drawl was warmer than ever in the darkness. “We learned to tell the neighbors that Daddy’s back was acting up, when, in truth, he’d drunk himself into a stupor again. And I don’t know how many times I told the school nurse that my lip was split or my eye was black because I walked into a door or a tree or fell off my bike. Hell, I didn’t even have a bike, but I figured she wouldn’t know that. I liked telling the lies, because in order to convince her that what I was saying was true, I had to believe it myself. And I liked believing I had a bike I could fall off of. I liked being this other kid whose father really did have a bad back.”
At first i really disliked Kate. because seen through Jed's eyes her mistrust caused him pain and shame. But as the story goes on we see that she has been through so much, too. And seeing them come together was great. Still, there were things I didn't like about her and, to me, she faded in comparison to the Greatness That Is Jed.
I really wanted to hate her when she said.
“True, Jed had been clean for more than five years, but he’d told her today that staying sober was painfully difficult. Who in their right mind would want to deal with that on an ongoing basis?”
And I actually succeeded for a while. Then there are these situations...
“She didn’t want Jericho, she corrected herself. She wanted Laramie. And those were two very different things.”
"His smile of relief was genuine.
At least she thought it was genuine.
He was, however, the best actor she’d ever met in her life."
"Had she ever seen the real Jed? Or had he always just flip-flopped between Jericho and Laramie?"
Laramie is the role Jed plays in the movie. This is one of the strangest relationship problem I've ever seen. She's constantly worried about his reactions-Are they genuine or not? Is he acting?
Even stranger, sometimes, in his POV, we see that he does start doing it when he's extremely uncomfortable. But don't we all pretend we're ok when we're not? It was made such a big deal. And later when we learn it is, I could see the problem, but, I don't know.
Here is his statement which loved...
“I’m probably going to need to be in therapy until the day I die. I’m never going to be very good at just… talking about how I feel. Most of the time I don’t even know how the hell I feel. But I know when I’m with you, I actually like myself. For the first time in my life, I don’t have to pretend to be someone else.
I know I’m not the easiest person in the world to live with. And I can’t guarantee that I won’t slip back into any old bad habits. I know you still don’t really trust me, but I don’t resent that. Really. I don’t blame you—I’m okay with it. I’ll just keep on working to reestablish myself as someone worthy of your trust.
“Meanwhile, I’ll keep trying to be honest with you and tell you how I feel. But the truth is, there’s really only one promise that I can make you, and it’s that I’ll love you forever.”
In the end, I adored Jed, thought Kate was so-so and found the acting-all-the-time-suspicions slightly weird.
The filming was very interesting, the side characters as well and I thought the problems of addiction and overcoming one's past were handled very well here.
Somehow, reading the blurb I thought this was going to be a light book. It wasn't. For its setting, it was surprisingly emotional and raw. Just to mention-I'm huge fan of the Troubleshooter series, but this book just GOT to me. Mostly 'cause of Jericho.
Jericho Beaumont has hit rock bottom 5 years ago and he just can't seem to find his way back to the top. This movie is the opportunity of a lifetime and he would do anything to play in this movie. Even surrender his privacy and pride by signing a contract that enables the producers to constantly watch him, control him, watch him for any hint of substance abuse...
"He forced his anger and his shame away, and made himself feel nothing as he signed both copies of the agreement, writing the date next to his name. He sensed Kate standing behind him, and as he put the pen down, he turned to her, not bothering to hide the emptiness in his eyes."
Jericho, aka Jed is an incredible character. He struggles every day to overcome his addiction. He has been through hell and his entire life he wanted just this-to be an actor. He's vulnerable, but used to keeping people away, by acting, playing the role of a laid back playboy. I loved him more than I can say, so kudos to Ms. Brockmann for writing such a deep, incredible character.
“You know, if you weren’t my producer, I’d tell you that for some people, the craving never goes away. It’s always back there, lurking, day after day. And if I really wanted to scare you to death, I might even tell you that there hasn’t been one single day in the past five years, four months, and twenty-two days, that I haven’t wished for a drink. And that’s why some very smart person made up that slogan, one day at a time. See, instead of saying that I’ve got to stay sober another five years— which sounds pretty impossible—all I have to do is make it through today. Hell, all I have to do is get through the next few hours without taking a drink. And then I have to get through the next few hours until another day is done. I can handle a few hours, and even if I can’t, I know I can handle a few minutes. And when you add all those minutes and hours together, presto change-o, what do you know? They become five years, four months, and twenty-two days. And you’ve got yourself a real life instead of a blur of binges and hangovers.”
“I learned to lie early.” Jericho’s soft southern drawl was warmer than ever in the darkness. “We learned to tell the neighbors that Daddy’s back was acting up, when, in truth, he’d drunk himself into a stupor again. And I don’t know how many times I told the school nurse that my lip was split or my eye was black because I walked into a door or a tree or fell off my bike. Hell, I didn’t even have a bike, but I figured she wouldn’t know that. I liked telling the lies, because in order to convince her that what I was saying was true, I had to believe it myself. And I liked believing I had a bike I could fall off of. I liked being this other kid whose father really did have a bad back.”
At first i really disliked Kate. because seen through Jed's eyes her mistrust caused him pain and shame. But as the story goes on we see that she has been through so much, too. And seeing them come together was great. Still, there were things I didn't like about her and, to me, she faded in comparison to the Greatness That Is Jed.
I really wanted to hate her when she said.
“True, Jed had been clean for more than five years, but he’d told her today that staying sober was painfully difficult. Who in their right mind would want to deal with that on an ongoing basis?”
And I actually succeeded for a while. Then there are these situations...
“She didn’t want Jericho, she corrected herself. She wanted Laramie. And those were two very different things.”
"His smile of relief was genuine.
At least she thought it was genuine.
He was, however, the best actor she’d ever met in her life."
"Had she ever seen the real Jed? Or had he always just flip-flopped between Jericho and Laramie?"
Laramie is the role Jed plays in the movie. This is one of the strangest relationship problem I've ever seen. She's constantly worried about his reactions-Are they genuine or not? Is he acting?
Even stranger, sometimes, in his POV, we see that he does start doing it when he's extremely uncomfortable. But don't we all pretend we're ok when we're not? It was made such a big deal. And later when we learn it is, I could see the problem, but, I don't know.
Here is his statement which loved...
“I’m probably going to need to be in therapy until the day I die. I’m never going to be very good at just… talking about how I feel. Most of the time I don’t even know how the hell I feel. But I know when I’m with you, I actually like myself. For the first time in my life, I don’t have to pretend to be someone else.
I know I’m not the easiest person in the world to live with. And I can’t guarantee that I won’t slip back into any old bad habits. I know you still don’t really trust me, but I don’t resent that. Really. I don’t blame you—I’m okay with it. I’ll just keep on working to reestablish myself as someone worthy of your trust.
“Meanwhile, I’ll keep trying to be honest with you and tell you how I feel. But the truth is, there’s really only one promise that I can make you, and it’s that I’ll love you forever.”
In the end, I adored Jed, thought Kate was so-so and found the acting-all-the-time-suspicions slightly weird.
The filming was very interesting, the side characters as well and I thought the problems of addiction and overcoming one's past were handled very well here.
January 14, 2011
I am such a sucker for Hollywood romances! By the description, this was my ideal contemporary romance. A gorgeous, larger than life, tortured hero. I couldn't wait! Unfortunatey, then I met the heroine.
This is a relationship based on control, and I really, really detest relationships based on this unhealthy premise. Jericho Beaumont is a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. His career has been ruined, and he is desperately trying to rebuild his life. To say I loved this character would be a huge understatement. This is a man with a horrific past who readily admits his mistakes and courageously and humbly is trying to rebuild his life and career. I loved his honesty and his vulnerability. He embodies my definition of a "to die for" hero and I felt he deserved someone so much kinder than Kate O'Laughlin.
Kate O'Laughlin is the worst kind of heroine. She is a "control freak" who embarrasses Jericho from the get go. She holds power over him as she is the producer of the film he's attempting his "come back" with. Kate never lets him forget that she holds his future in the palm of her hand. Time and time again she has opportunities to believe in this man, and time after time she proves herself incapable of what Jericho desperately needs......someone to believe in him.
I found myself so irritated by Kate, and somewhat irritated that Jericho allows himself to be treated in such demeaning ways! Towards the end, a light bulb finally goes off in Kate's mind and she suddenly trusts this man who has been deserving of her trust for most of the book. It was a little "too little too late" for me. I think he should've moved past her and found someone with less insecurity and more heart. I recommend this book for the hero alone. I cannot recommend the story.
This is a relationship based on control, and I really, really detest relationships based on this unhealthy premise. Jericho Beaumont is a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. His career has been ruined, and he is desperately trying to rebuild his life. To say I loved this character would be a huge understatement. This is a man with a horrific past who readily admits his mistakes and courageously and humbly is trying to rebuild his life and career. I loved his honesty and his vulnerability. He embodies my definition of a "to die for" hero and I felt he deserved someone so much kinder than Kate O'Laughlin.
Kate O'Laughlin is the worst kind of heroine. She is a "control freak" who embarrasses Jericho from the get go. She holds power over him as she is the producer of the film he's attempting his "come back" with. Kate never lets him forget that she holds his future in the palm of her hand. Time and time again she has opportunities to believe in this man, and time after time she proves herself incapable of what Jericho desperately needs......someone to believe in him.
I found myself so irritated by Kate, and somewhat irritated that Jericho allows himself to be treated in such demeaning ways! Towards the end, a light bulb finally goes off in Kate's mind and she suddenly trusts this man who has been deserving of her trust for most of the book. It was a little "too little too late" for me. I think he should've moved past her and found someone with less insecurity and more heart. I recommend this book for the hero alone. I cannot recommend the story.
June 15, 2018
This is an oldie and I generally love Suzanne Brockmann's oldies. It isn't a SEAL story or a funny romance, it doesn't have any mystery or suspense, either. It isn't sweet, there are a lot of serious issues this couple have to work through, but they do and I really liked it.
Kate O'Laughlin has a real problem with the image that actor Jericho Beaumont has. He was the darling of Hollywood until about five years ago. Now he is down to attending casting calls. Quite a fall for the "Sexiest Man Alive" and three time Oscar nominee. She sees nothing but disaster for the movie project she is the producer for. Jericho is a brilliant actor, but a very flawed person and it is the flawed person she has serious reservations about, until she gets to know him. She has to have him if she wants to get this movie made, but she puts such outrageously strict conditions on him that he must comply with or he's out.
This project is more than a paycheck for Kate. It's personal and the last thing she wants is to fall under the spell of Jericho Beaumont, but the more she gets to know him the more she realizes that there are two very different people existing inside Jericho. One she can do without and one she is falling in love with.
Kate O'Laughlin has a real problem with the image that actor Jericho Beaumont has. He was the darling of Hollywood until about five years ago. Now he is down to attending casting calls. Quite a fall for the "Sexiest Man Alive" and three time Oscar nominee. She sees nothing but disaster for the movie project she is the producer for. Jericho is a brilliant actor, but a very flawed person and it is the flawed person she has serious reservations about, until she gets to know him. She has to have him if she wants to get this movie made, but she puts such outrageously strict conditions on him that he must comply with or he's out.
This project is more than a paycheck for Kate. It's personal and the last thing she wants is to fall under the spell of Jericho Beaumont, but the more she gets to know him the more she realizes that there are two very different people existing inside Jericho. One she can do without and one she is falling in love with.
November 6, 2015
da www.sognipensieriparole.com
Non fatevi ingannare dalla cover deludente e dall’orrido titolo che non rende assolutamente l’Heartthrob originale, ovvero l’idolo, il rubacuori. Questo romanzo di Suzanne Brokmann vi farà ridere, vi farà sospirare e vi farà commuovere, con una scrittura pulita e un ritmo sempre sostenuto.
Jericho, anzi Jed, è stato un idolo cinematografico di grande successo e da cinque anni è in lento e inesorabile declino, a causa delle dipendenze da alcol e droghe mai del tutto superate. Fare questo film è la sua ultima possibilità di riscatto, perché il personaggio sembra essere scritto apposta per lui, ha dentro il suo stesso buio, ha la stessa voglia di ritornare a vivere. Peccato che la produttrice, a sua volta un’ex attrice di film ad alto contenuto erotico, non ne voglia sapere di perdenti e di bellocci senz’anima.
Avevo già letto altro della Brokmann e quindi mi aspettavo un romanzo intenso e scritto bene, e direi che qui è stato anche tradotto al meglio, perché ho trovato una serie continua di scene ben riuscite, dialoghi brillanti, frasi da appuntare.
Ho adorato Jed e la sua lotta dolce-amara per dimostrare di avere cuore e di non essere solo un personaggio che sa dire bene le sue battute. E ho amato Kate e il suo desiderio di essere presa sul serio, al di là di avere un corpo mozzafiato che l’ha ingabbiata dietro una cortina di pregiudizi.
Assolutamente azzeccata poi l’idea di seguire lo sviluppo della la storia principale e quelle degli altri comprimari in parallelo con la lavorazione del film “La promessa” e la recitazione delle varie scene: alla fine non avrei esitato a pagare il biglietto per andare anch’io al cinema!
Non fatevi ingannare dalla cover deludente e dall’orrido titolo che non rende assolutamente l’Heartthrob originale, ovvero l’idolo, il rubacuori. Questo romanzo di Suzanne Brokmann vi farà ridere, vi farà sospirare e vi farà commuovere, con una scrittura pulita e un ritmo sempre sostenuto.
Jericho, anzi Jed, è stato un idolo cinematografico di grande successo e da cinque anni è in lento e inesorabile declino, a causa delle dipendenze da alcol e droghe mai del tutto superate. Fare questo film è la sua ultima possibilità di riscatto, perché il personaggio sembra essere scritto apposta per lui, ha dentro il suo stesso buio, ha la stessa voglia di ritornare a vivere. Peccato che la produttrice, a sua volta un’ex attrice di film ad alto contenuto erotico, non ne voglia sapere di perdenti e di bellocci senz’anima.
Avevo già letto altro della Brokmann e quindi mi aspettavo un romanzo intenso e scritto bene, e direi che qui è stato anche tradotto al meglio, perché ho trovato una serie continua di scene ben riuscite, dialoghi brillanti, frasi da appuntare.
Ho adorato Jed e la sua lotta dolce-amara per dimostrare di avere cuore e di non essere solo un personaggio che sa dire bene le sue battute. E ho amato Kate e il suo desiderio di essere presa sul serio, al di là di avere un corpo mozzafiato che l’ha ingabbiata dietro una cortina di pregiudizi.
Assolutamente azzeccata poi l’idea di seguire lo sviluppo della la storia principale e quelle degli altri comprimari in parallelo con la lavorazione del film “La promessa” e la recitazione delle varie scene: alla fine non avrei esitato a pagare il biglietto per andare anch’io al cinema!
November 23, 2021
Meraviglioso Jed... ogni tanto hai la fortuna di leggere dei gioielli, questo libro è bello per quanto commuovente...
March 18, 2016
La Brockmann si conferma una regina, qualunque cosa esca dalla sua penna, diventa un libro irrinunciabile.
Di grande impatto l'ambientazione hollywoodiana, che l'autrice affronta con perizia e attenzione; tutte le dinamiche della realizzazione di un film, dell'interazione tra attori, produttori e registi, è accurata e ben resa, si capisce che la Brockmann si è documentata e non ha lasciato nulla al caso. Per un’appassionata di cinema come me è stata una manna dal cielo.
L'elemento vincente di questo romanzo sono però i personaggi da lei narrati, da Kate, fragile e battagliera, ricca di sfumature non scontate, ai due giovani protagonisti Susie e Jamaal, teneri e delicati come il legame che li unisce; fino al meraviglioso personaggio di Jed, pieno di ombre e di passionalità, che ami fin dalla sua prima apparizione, che buca le pagine così come un attore dovrebbe bucare lo schermo.
Bellissimo anche il finale, la Brockmann poteva ambientarlo nello sfarzo e nella gloria, che sarebbe stata la scelta più scontata e cinematografica, e invece si mantiene nell'intimità di un momento privato e delicato per Kate e Jed.
Chapeau.
Di grande impatto l'ambientazione hollywoodiana, che l'autrice affronta con perizia e attenzione; tutte le dinamiche della realizzazione di un film, dell'interazione tra attori, produttori e registi, è accurata e ben resa, si capisce che la Brockmann si è documentata e non ha lasciato nulla al caso. Per un’appassionata di cinema come me è stata una manna dal cielo.
L'elemento vincente di questo romanzo sono però i personaggi da lei narrati, da Kate, fragile e battagliera, ricca di sfumature non scontate, ai due giovani protagonisti Susie e Jamaal, teneri e delicati come il legame che li unisce; fino al meraviglioso personaggio di Jed, pieno di ombre e di passionalità, che ami fin dalla sua prima apparizione, che buca le pagine così come un attore dovrebbe bucare lo schermo.
Bellissimo anche il finale, la Brockmann poteva ambientarlo nello sfarzo e nella gloria, che sarebbe stata la scelta più scontata e cinematografica, e invece si mantiene nell'intimità di un momento privato e delicato per Kate e Jed.
Chapeau.
March 25, 2018
3.75 for me. Audiobook. I liked the characters. Jericho was a good character but I thought he wasn't always so nice. Especially ialpy in his initial interactions with the cast and crew on set. But he transitioned and it was much better. I really liked Kate - she was more than the sum of her parts. She had nice depth and was a good match. Overall a good book and the narrator did a good job.
June 11, 2009
This is one of SB's best that I have read. I really liked the way the story is written and the way the characters interact with each other. She uses part of the plot line of a movie in production to bring out the feelings of the characters and help them through their own vulnerabilities. You want to hate them but you end up loving them instead. The side characters in this are really wonderful and have great depth. they not only help the story along, but add a different ellement to the story that is needed to help the main charracters discover themselves.
Jerico (Jed) Beaumont, a once popular actor and recoving substance abuser, is looking for his next part. He isn't offered parts the way he used to be. There were some incidents a few years ago befor he got into rehab, that marked him as trouble. Now he is really in need of a job and goes to an open call for a part he really wants, but can't get just by name alone.
Kate O'Laughlin is the producer of a movie that doesn't want Jerico Beaumont on her film. She heard he is trouble and can't risk having him delay the schedule for any of his substance abuse problems. But when her ex-husband Director sends her a video tape of Jerico from the try out, he is Laramie, the lead in her film. After working through the problem she comes up with a solution of having 24/7 supervision, drug testing etc. and presents an addendum to the contract to Jerico. Of coarse he is angry and hurt, but in the end he sign's the addendum and when the film starts to shoot he is there and ready to work, albeit with a chip on his shoulder.
When a nasty encounter with his superviser happens, Kate has to fire the supervisor. But then has no-one to watch her lead actor. Kate is attracted to Jerico even though she knows that he is trouble, but her anger and his smart mouth make her want to keep her distance. When she can't find anyone to Baby-Sit her lead, she is forced to watch him herself.
Jerico sees that having Kate stuck with him could be a great way to get back at her for forcing him to sign the addendum, by seducing her, using her and walking away laughing. But over time he comes to really respect Kate and like her as a person, and is still attracted to her. Kate feels the same but she is really hesitant to become involved with him. She can't tell when he is acting and when he isn't. What is the true Jerico?
When Jerico has to attend a benefit that he promised to attend for a friend Kate must accompany him to keep up her watch. Of coarse this is the perfect setting to be able to seduce her, but it turns out to be alot more to both of them. When Kate finds out the he lied to her about something she feels that last night was just another manuver to Jed.
Jed doesn't know what to do. He feels that he is damned if he does and damned if he doesn't. He is really falling for Kate, but she thinks everything is a lie, or some kind of tactic. Over time they find their way together and help some of the other cast members with their lives as well. But when David, Jed's best freind, is killed, Jed hides his feelings just as he has learned to do his entire life. Kate tries to break through his tough exterior, but she can't seem to get through and help him to deal with his freinds death. Feeling that she has no choice she breaks things off with Jed. But while she is away Jed makes a breakthrough is his feelings and relizes that his feelings for her are much stronger and that he can't live with out her. Upon her return to the set he shows her that he needs her and her help to overcome his greif for his freind.
Jerico (Jed) Beaumont, a once popular actor and recoving substance abuser, is looking for his next part. He isn't offered parts the way he used to be. There were some incidents a few years ago befor he got into rehab, that marked him as trouble. Now he is really in need of a job and goes to an open call for a part he really wants, but can't get just by name alone.
Kate O'Laughlin is the producer of a movie that doesn't want Jerico Beaumont on her film. She heard he is trouble and can't risk having him delay the schedule for any of his substance abuse problems. But when her ex-husband Director sends her a video tape of Jerico from the try out, he is Laramie, the lead in her film. After working through the problem she comes up with a solution of having 24/7 supervision, drug testing etc. and presents an addendum to the contract to Jerico. Of coarse he is angry and hurt, but in the end he sign's the addendum and when the film starts to shoot he is there and ready to work, albeit with a chip on his shoulder.
When a nasty encounter with his superviser happens, Kate has to fire the supervisor. But then has no-one to watch her lead actor. Kate is attracted to Jerico even though she knows that he is trouble, but her anger and his smart mouth make her want to keep her distance. When she can't find anyone to Baby-Sit her lead, she is forced to watch him herself.
Jerico sees that having Kate stuck with him could be a great way to get back at her for forcing him to sign the addendum, by seducing her, using her and walking away laughing. But over time he comes to really respect Kate and like her as a person, and is still attracted to her. Kate feels the same but she is really hesitant to become involved with him. She can't tell when he is acting and when he isn't. What is the true Jerico?
When Jerico has to attend a benefit that he promised to attend for a friend Kate must accompany him to keep up her watch. Of coarse this is the perfect setting to be able to seduce her, but it turns out to be alot more to both of them. When Kate finds out the he lied to her about something she feels that last night was just another manuver to Jed.
Jed doesn't know what to do. He feels that he is damned if he does and damned if he doesn't. He is really falling for Kate, but she thinks everything is a lie, or some kind of tactic. Over time they find their way together and help some of the other cast members with their lives as well. But when David, Jed's best freind, is killed, Jed hides his feelings just as he has learned to do his entire life. Kate tries to break through his tough exterior, but she can't seem to get through and help him to deal with his freinds death. Feeling that she has no choice she breaks things off with Jed. But while she is away Jed makes a breakthrough is his feelings and relizes that his feelings for her are much stronger and that he can't live with out her. Upon her return to the set he shows her that he needs her and her help to overcome his greif for his freind.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 5, 2015
RECENSIONE SCRITTA PER IL BLOG NEW ADULT ITALIA
Ho conosciuto e amato questa autrice con la serie suspense Troubleshooters. Ero proprio curiosa di leggere un suo contemporary romance e vedere come se la sarebbe cavata. Egregiamente signore e signori. Egregiamente. Ho ritrovato le caratteristiche che me l'hanno fatta apprezzare tanto: l'accuratezza nella costruzione di personaggi umani e credibili, una trama non banale e coerente, la capacità di coinvolgere a pieno il lettore.
Kate è una donna di successo, forte e determinata, ma che non ha perso la propria sensibilità e femminilità. Quando ha capito, da giovanissima, di non essere abbastanza brava per sfondare come attrice, ha deciso di buttarsi in un altro campo. E' diventata una donna d'affari e ha fatto i soldi. Denaro che poi ha utilizzato per tornare a fare quello che ama davvero: il cinema. Non più come attrice, ma come sceneggiatrice e produttrice. "Promessa" è la sua creatura, ci ha investito non solo tutto il suo capitale, ma anche tutte le proprie speranze. Non può fallire.
Per questo, quando il regista le comunica di aver assunto Jericho Beaumont, lei si oppone con tutte le sue forze. Beaumont è un ex drogato e alcolista. Con la sua inaffidabilità, potrebbe mandare a monte tutta la produzione. Ma allo stesso tempo, Jericho veste i panni di Laramie, il protagonista del film, con una naturalezza e una credibilità senza precedenti. Jericho è Laramie.
Jericho sa che questa è la sua ultima possibilità. Desidera quel ruolo con tutte le sue forze, è perfetto per lui ed è consapevole che potrebbe riportarlo in cima all'Olimpo di Hollywood. E' disposto a tutto pur di ottenerlo, compreso ingoiare l'orgoglio e accettare di essere sorvegliato giorno e notte. Ma non per questo è contento di farlo, anzi, odia Kate per averlo costretto ad accettare condizioni che sono per lui degradanti. Decide così di vendicarsi seducendola.
Da qui in poi, le cose di fanno parecchio complicate. Jericho è un personaggio complesso, tormentato, profondamente turbato da un'infanzia terribile. E' un attore straordinario e non smette mai di interpretare un ruolo. Quello dell'attore affascinante quando ha un pubblico, quello di un Laramie fragile e sincero quando vuole conquistare Kate. Ma se stesso, il vero Jed, è chiuso a chiave dentro di lui e non gli permette di venire allo scoperto.
Una serie di eventi, mettono alla prova il suo autocontrollo. Il suo continuo reprimere le emozioni, lo porta sull'orlo dell'implosione, rischiando di rovinare tutto quello che gli sta davvero a cuore: la carriera e il suo rapporto con Kate. Ce la farà a venire a patti con se stesso e con il suo passato?
Un romanzo curato sotto tutti gli aspetti, che mi ha appassionata davvero tanto, con dei protagonisti che non dimenticherò tanto presto.
Ho conosciuto e amato questa autrice con la serie suspense Troubleshooters. Ero proprio curiosa di leggere un suo contemporary romance e vedere come se la sarebbe cavata. Egregiamente signore e signori. Egregiamente. Ho ritrovato le caratteristiche che me l'hanno fatta apprezzare tanto: l'accuratezza nella costruzione di personaggi umani e credibili, una trama non banale e coerente, la capacità di coinvolgere a pieno il lettore.
Kate è una donna di successo, forte e determinata, ma che non ha perso la propria sensibilità e femminilità. Quando ha capito, da giovanissima, di non essere abbastanza brava per sfondare come attrice, ha deciso di buttarsi in un altro campo. E' diventata una donna d'affari e ha fatto i soldi. Denaro che poi ha utilizzato per tornare a fare quello che ama davvero: il cinema. Non più come attrice, ma come sceneggiatrice e produttrice. "Promessa" è la sua creatura, ci ha investito non solo tutto il suo capitale, ma anche tutte le proprie speranze. Non può fallire.
Per questo, quando il regista le comunica di aver assunto Jericho Beaumont, lei si oppone con tutte le sue forze. Beaumont è un ex drogato e alcolista. Con la sua inaffidabilità, potrebbe mandare a monte tutta la produzione. Ma allo stesso tempo, Jericho veste i panni di Laramie, il protagonista del film, con una naturalezza e una credibilità senza precedenti. Jericho è Laramie.
Jericho sa che questa è la sua ultima possibilità. Desidera quel ruolo con tutte le sue forze, è perfetto per lui ed è consapevole che potrebbe riportarlo in cima all'Olimpo di Hollywood. E' disposto a tutto pur di ottenerlo, compreso ingoiare l'orgoglio e accettare di essere sorvegliato giorno e notte. Ma non per questo è contento di farlo, anzi, odia Kate per averlo costretto ad accettare condizioni che sono per lui degradanti. Decide così di vendicarsi seducendola.
Da qui in poi, le cose di fanno parecchio complicate. Jericho è un personaggio complesso, tormentato, profondamente turbato da un'infanzia terribile. E' un attore straordinario e non smette mai di interpretare un ruolo. Quello dell'attore affascinante quando ha un pubblico, quello di un Laramie fragile e sincero quando vuole conquistare Kate. Ma se stesso, il vero Jed, è chiuso a chiave dentro di lui e non gli permette di venire allo scoperto.
Una serie di eventi, mettono alla prova il suo autocontrollo. Il suo continuo reprimere le emozioni, lo porta sull'orlo dell'implosione, rischiando di rovinare tutto quello che gli sta davvero a cuore: la carriera e il suo rapporto con Kate. Ce la farà a venire a patti con se stesso e con il suo passato?
Un romanzo curato sotto tutti gli aspetti, che mi ha appassionata davvero tanto, con dei protagonisti che non dimenticherò tanto presto.
April 19, 2009
I'd read reviews calling this Brockmann's best non-Troubleshooters book, but I think I liked Bodyguard more, frankly. Maybe it was the lack of military personnel. This is straight romance, not a suspense novel, which would have been fine, but I frankly didn't find the heroine that likable. Kate's too controlling and untrusting, to the point where, when she and Jericho had their big moment at the end of the novel, I almost didn't buy it, because his breakdown was so conveniently timed that I figured she'd think he was acting and the angst would just keep going.
What I think is kind of fun about reading these older Brockmann novels is that you can kind of see hints of themes she'll revisit in the Troubleshooters series. Jericho Beaumont is an alcoholic actor. He had an alcoholic parent who beat him. I thought, well, hey, he's like a straight Robin Chadwick. It turns out the similarities kind of end there. Jericho started drinking and abusing painkillers because he was ashamed of something he'd done (whereas, in the Troubleshooters series, Robin tells his adoring public that he started drinking because he was in denial about being gay... you can see where these stories might have gone in vastly different directions).
This novel also really piles on the angst. Just when you think these characters can get their acts together, something else happens. It got to be a little much towards the end of the novel.
And the Susie/Jamaal stuff was sweet, but I found myself wanting to skip over it in favor of getting back to Kate/Jericho, which is interesting considering I didn't like Kate that much.
I still devoured the book. Brockmann is still one of the better romance writers out there. But I think I like her books more when there are Navy SEALs and FBI agents and gunfights and "international incidents."
What I think is kind of fun about reading these older Brockmann novels is that you can kind of see hints of themes she'll revisit in the Troubleshooters series. Jericho Beaumont is an alcoholic actor. He had an alcoholic parent who beat him. I thought, well, hey, he's like a straight Robin Chadwick. It turns out the similarities kind of end there. Jericho started drinking and abusing painkillers because he was ashamed of something he'd done (whereas, in the Troubleshooters series, Robin tells his adoring public that he started drinking because he was in denial about being gay... you can see where these stories might have gone in vastly different directions).
This novel also really piles on the angst. Just when you think these characters can get their acts together, something else happens. It got to be a little much towards the end of the novel.
And the Susie/Jamaal stuff was sweet, but I found myself wanting to skip over it in favor of getting back to Kate/Jericho, which is interesting considering I didn't like Kate that much.
I still devoured the book. Brockmann is still one of the better romance writers out there. But I think I like her books more when there are Navy SEALs and FBI agents and gunfights and "international incidents."
October 6, 2012
For me, that book was the worst Brockmann ever, Seal or non-Seal.
I would have given it 1.5 stars, as it was as usual nicely written; but I really feel its rating over over inflated.
At first, I just hated the hero, former alcoholic and recovering subscription drug-addict, compulsive liar and master manipulator/actor; to be short, one of the most abhorrent hero I've ever met; and even though some explanations further on made me understand him and better accept it, it definitely was way too late for him to grow on me.
Then after reading for a while (like around page 150), I realized the heroine who I had not managed to really grasp at first was just an woman completely frustrated and angry never acknowledging that, nor doing something about it.
The writing was nice but I was really getting bored with the ultra-repetitive motto that Jed was longing for a drink. I know it's probably very realistic of what a former addict thinks. All in all I found this book completely depressing and lacking any hope and optimism.
At the end, the hero says he will probably spend the rest of his life through therapy. My thoughts were "yeah, and your future wife should also take on one as well". And I hope those two depressant never manage to procreate...
Not what I should believe in at the end of a romance.
I would have given it 1.5 stars, as it was as usual nicely written; but I really feel its rating over over inflated.
At first, I just hated the hero, former alcoholic and recovering subscription drug-addict, compulsive liar and master manipulator/actor; to be short, one of the most abhorrent hero I've ever met; and even though some explanations further on made me understand him and better accept it, it definitely was way too late for him to grow on me.
Then after reading for a while (like around page 150), I realized the heroine who I had not managed to really grasp at first was just an woman completely frustrated and angry never acknowledging that, nor doing something about it.
The writing was nice but I was really getting bored with the ultra-repetitive motto that Jed was longing for a drink. I know it's probably very realistic of what a former addict thinks. All in all I found this book completely depressing and lacking any hope and optimism.
At the end, the hero says he will probably spend the rest of his life through therapy. My thoughts were "yeah, and your future wife should also take on one as well". And I hope those two depressant never manage to procreate...
Not what I should believe in at the end of a romance.
July 17, 2015
This is a very angry story. It's supposed to be a romance and I'm sure it will eventually get there at some point! It's hard reading as the hero (Jed) is a recovering drug addict and alcoholic and no one in the film industry wants to give him another chance, so he's angry and disgruntled. The heroine (Kate) is a flat-out bitch and nasty to boot (though I guess they could be one and the same). If I didn't need this book to finish a challenge this month, I would have deep-sixed it. I'm sure it will turn out fine but God what depressing crap.
UPDATE: This story was just depressing and rather boring! They are filming a pre-Civil War movie about slavery - UGH! Not a topic I ever read about or watch movies about as it's just so depressing and a rotten time in our history that we should all be ashamed of. Not even the interaction between Kate and Jed was exciting. Just blah blah blah over and over again. YUK!
UPDATE: This story was just depressing and rather boring! They are filming a pre-Civil War movie about slavery - UGH! Not a topic I ever read about or watch movies about as it's just so depressing and a rotten time in our history that we should all be ashamed of. Not even the interaction between Kate and Jed was exciting. Just blah blah blah over and over again. YUK!
March 16, 2016
Davvero bello!
Jericho/Jed/Jeddo, attore, ex alcolista, ex dipendente da antidolorifici, è un uomo provato dalla vita e ormai nessuno lo vuole più ingaggiare per girare un film. Neanche Kate, produttrice e sceneggiatrice vorrebbe, ma alla fine decide di dargli una chance, ma solamente dietro stretta sorveglianza di Jed. Quando però Bob, il "carceriere" di Jericho esagera, sarà Kate in persona che si assumerà l'obbligo di tenerlo sott'occhio. La stretta convivenza tra i due fa nascere dei sentimenti profondi, ma non è facile capire quando Jed è serio o sta solo recitando, Kate non vuole farsi troppo coinvolgere in una storia con già la data di scadenza. Per fortuna Jed riuscirà a lasciarsi andare...
Bella anche la storia parallela tra Susie e Jamaal, con tutti i problemi connessi: padre troppo oppressivo, giovane età e colore della pelle.
E naturalmente anche la storia del film "La promessa", se esistesse davvero andrei a vederlo subito!
Jericho/Jed/Jeddo, attore, ex alcolista, ex dipendente da antidolorifici, è un uomo provato dalla vita e ormai nessuno lo vuole più ingaggiare per girare un film. Neanche Kate, produttrice e sceneggiatrice vorrebbe, ma alla fine decide di dargli una chance, ma solamente dietro stretta sorveglianza di Jed. Quando però Bob, il "carceriere" di Jericho esagera, sarà Kate in persona che si assumerà l'obbligo di tenerlo sott'occhio. La stretta convivenza tra i due fa nascere dei sentimenti profondi, ma non è facile capire quando Jed è serio o sta solo recitando, Kate non vuole farsi troppo coinvolgere in una storia con già la data di scadenza. Per fortuna Jed riuscirà a lasciarsi andare...
Bella anche la storia parallela tra Susie e Jamaal, con tutti i problemi connessi: padre troppo oppressivo, giovane età e colore della pelle.
E naturalmente anche la storia del film "La promessa", se esistesse davvero andrei a vederlo subito!
May 21, 2022
Loved the hero, a recovering alcoholic movie star, a man with an emotionally traumatic past. He is a strong lead, a true hero. The heroine who is immature, emotionally stunted whose traumatic past isn’t in line with her drama llama attitude and her near hate and distrust of all men. Truly this hero didn’t deserve this woman. Her final capitulation was too little too late. Ironically, there was a young love on the movie set and the young teen actress is a better, more mature, kinder person. I say ironically because she is the child in the book and the heroine acted younger and more mean girl teen.
June 26, 2018
I wasn't sure if I was gonna be able to read this book. After about 2 chapters I was losing interest. I have a GR friend who really liked it and she and I have a lot of the same tastes. I kept on going and ending up really liking this older book of hers. I want a Jed/Laramie/Jericho too! :)
March 19, 2010
The great thing about Brockmann— she can really transcend a laughable, cliched plot like no one’s business. I mean, “may just be more of a baby-sitting job than Kate can handle” is just cheesecake.
What I found in Hearthrob is a powerful redemption story about a man (Jed) who claws his way out of the gutter, and willing to sacrifice every ounce of pride he has on the way. What I didn’t find was an equally powerful story about a heroine who deserved him.
Overall, I found Kate judgmental, small-minded, and terribly ignorant. The contract she forces Jericho to sign is ridiculous (I kept thinking, could this piece of shizz even hold up in court?)— and the hoops she makes him jump through, even when she is wrong, are harsh. Jed had more risk of falling off the wagon dealing with that contract then he did from being an alcoholic in recovery.
Which really gets to my main complaint about Kate. It seemed like she knew very very little about recovering alcoholics, the nature of addiction, mental illness, etc. Her ignorance, the way she pushed and pushed Jed, wasn’t romantic to me, it was frightening.
When I got to the end and Jed’s big realization that he may need to spend the rest of his life earning back the trust that his addictions rightfully stripped from him- I thought, yes!- but not from Kate. And for someone spent a lifetime abusing alcohol to subsume anger and frustration, not being angry at Kate for the way she treated him rang false.
I realize she is meant to be a control freak, so devoted to her film that she risks love for control. But being that unaware of how her own actions were in fact jeopardizing the film, by jeopardizing Jed’s sobriety, that was too much for me. Jed finds redemption, but to me, Kate needed it more. I started wishing the book was a tragedy, and not a romance novel, so that Kate could, in fact, loose it all. And maybe learn something.
Without an equally solid heroine to meet Jed’s hero, the Happily Ever After wasn’t so happy for me. I enjoyed the book, wanted to love it more, but couldn’t let go of my own anger at Kate.
3 of 5 stars, and those three stars are all Jed.
—————————
There are also some real strange WTF moments in Hearthrob. Like when the older, white, Oscar-nominated actor takes on a mentoring role with the young, black actor and guides him through the difficult experience of playing a slave in the pre-Civil War South. Yeah. That was uncomfortable. In fact, every movie scene was lame. The dialogue made me cringe, over and over.
What I found in Hearthrob is a powerful redemption story about a man (Jed) who claws his way out of the gutter, and willing to sacrifice every ounce of pride he has on the way. What I didn’t find was an equally powerful story about a heroine who deserved him.
Overall, I found Kate judgmental, small-minded, and terribly ignorant. The contract she forces Jericho to sign is ridiculous (I kept thinking, could this piece of shizz even hold up in court?)— and the hoops she makes him jump through, even when she is wrong, are harsh. Jed had more risk of falling off the wagon dealing with that contract then he did from being an alcoholic in recovery.
Which really gets to my main complaint about Kate. It seemed like she knew very very little about recovering alcoholics, the nature of addiction, mental illness, etc. Her ignorance, the way she pushed and pushed Jed, wasn’t romantic to me, it was frightening.
When I got to the end and Jed’s big realization that he may need to spend the rest of his life earning back the trust that his addictions rightfully stripped from him- I thought, yes!- but not from Kate. And for someone spent a lifetime abusing alcohol to subsume anger and frustration, not being angry at Kate for the way she treated him rang false.
I realize she is meant to be a control freak, so devoted to her film that she risks love for control. But being that unaware of how her own actions were in fact jeopardizing the film, by jeopardizing Jed’s sobriety, that was too much for me. Jed finds redemption, but to me, Kate needed it more. I started wishing the book was a tragedy, and not a romance novel, so that Kate could, in fact, loose it all. And maybe learn something.
Without an equally solid heroine to meet Jed’s hero, the Happily Ever After wasn’t so happy for me. I enjoyed the book, wanted to love it more, but couldn’t let go of my own anger at Kate.
3 of 5 stars, and those three stars are all Jed.
—————————
There are also some real strange WTF moments in Hearthrob. Like when the older, white, Oscar-nominated actor takes on a mentoring role with the young, black actor and guides him through the difficult experience of playing a slave in the pre-Civil War South. Yeah. That was uncomfortable. In fact, every movie scene was lame. The dialogue made me cringe, over and over.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 4, 2015
Questo è uno di quei casi in cui la cover porta fuori strada... quando ho scelto questo libro ero certa di trovarmi ad affrontare una lettura leggera, malgrado fossi consapevole dei temi trattati, pensavo che questi fossero solo marginali.
Jericho 5 anni prima dello svolgersi della vicenda ha toccato il fondo, malgrado sia un attore veramente dotato sia fisicamente, è un tipo sexy e affascinante, che interpretativamente, è di una bravura e di un intensità fuori dalla norma, ormai non lo vuole più ingaggiare nessun regista importante per ovvi motivi.
Questo film potrebbe essere la sua ultima occasione, il suo riscatto dopo 5 anni di disintossicazione, ma nessuno si fida più di lui, in particolar modo la produttrice di questo film. Quindi decide di calpestare il sul suo orgoglio accettando delle clausole di contratto veramente degradanti. Dovrà essere continuamente sotto il controllo di una persona assegnatagli che tramite esami e perquisizioni giornaliere assicurerà che non faccia uso di alcool o droghe e rispetterà i suoi impegni.
Beh signore, Jericho è un personaggio indimenticabile, di un intensità e una profondità incredibile, io credo senza rischiare di esagerare che la Brockmann abbia fatto un lavoro veramente eccezionale con lui. Stiamo parlando di un uomo con un passato terribile che ammette i suoi errori e con coraggio e umiltà cerca di ricostruire la sua vita e la sua carriera. Lotta ogni giorno con la sua dipendenza. E' sceso all'inferno e costantemente rischia di ritornarci. L'autrice ci fa veramente vivere questa situazione, è talmente reale e ben descritta che la senti in tutte le sue sfumature. Ho adorato come ha descritto la onestà e la vulnerabilità del protagonista.
CONTINUA A LEGGERE LA RECENSIONE SU NEW ADULT e DINTORNI
Jericho 5 anni prima dello svolgersi della vicenda ha toccato il fondo, malgrado sia un attore veramente dotato sia fisicamente, è un tipo sexy e affascinante, che interpretativamente, è di una bravura e di un intensità fuori dalla norma, ormai non lo vuole più ingaggiare nessun regista importante per ovvi motivi.
Questo film potrebbe essere la sua ultima occasione, il suo riscatto dopo 5 anni di disintossicazione, ma nessuno si fida più di lui, in particolar modo la produttrice di questo film. Quindi decide di calpestare il sul suo orgoglio accettando delle clausole di contratto veramente degradanti. Dovrà essere continuamente sotto il controllo di una persona assegnatagli che tramite esami e perquisizioni giornaliere assicurerà che non faccia uso di alcool o droghe e rispetterà i suoi impegni.
Beh signore, Jericho è un personaggio indimenticabile, di un intensità e una profondità incredibile, io credo senza rischiare di esagerare che la Brockmann abbia fatto un lavoro veramente eccezionale con lui. Stiamo parlando di un uomo con un passato terribile che ammette i suoi errori e con coraggio e umiltà cerca di ricostruire la sua vita e la sua carriera. Lotta ogni giorno con la sua dipendenza. E' sceso all'inferno e costantemente rischia di ritornarci. L'autrice ci fa veramente vivere questa situazione, è talmente reale e ben descritta che la senti in tutte le sue sfumature. Ho adorato come ha descritto la onestà e la vulnerabilità del protagonista.
CONTINUA A LEGGERE LA RECENSIONE SU NEW ADULT e DINTORNI
November 5, 2010
Oh, Lord. This book could have been good if two things occured.
1. The subplot between the two teenagers was cut out, because it was boring and took up space.
2. Kate, the supposed "heroine" who is more like a villian, was actually nice.
Okay, so I loved Jed. He is a man with real problems that he is, like I said, MAN enough to face. He has a good heart, but he is flawed, makes mistakes, learns from them, and is not too proud or arrogant to correct them. He's also far too forgiving and kind.
Kate is an evil b*atch who goes out of her way to constantly humilate poor Jed. Of course, he puts up with this throughout the whole book. She believes she knows everything there is to know about him and judges him harshly and without reason at every turn. She also insults him constantly and thinks of him as less than a human being. Now, there is a line she will not cross, but, let me tell you, that line is too far out to be useful. She spends the ENTIRE book distrusting him, so their relationship is built on this distrust (on her end). Then, miraculously and for no reason at the very end of the book, Kate decides that, OMG, every single word out of Jed's mouth isn't a lie after all! And, OMG, Jed really is JED, and not playing a character to seduce me and my amazing irresistableness! And, OMG, I trust Jed! Then, the end.
Also, there is a random death that comes out of nowhere and seems unbelievably forced to add conflict. Jed's "breakdown" is glossed over and wrapped up in one single sentence, which made steam come out of my ears, because I waited the whole book for this to happen. Clearly, Brockmann was done with this story and just wanted to finsih asap.
But, despite this, it was an entertaining read, and when Kate had her few nice moments (most of which occured when she was stoned), I enjoyed myself.
1. The subplot between the two teenagers was cut out, because it was boring and took up space.
2. Kate, the supposed "heroine" who is more like a villian, was actually nice.
Okay, so I loved Jed. He is a man with real problems that he is, like I said, MAN enough to face. He has a good heart, but he is flawed, makes mistakes, learns from them, and is not too proud or arrogant to correct them. He's also far too forgiving and kind.
Kate is an evil b*atch who goes out of her way to constantly humilate poor Jed. Of course, he puts up with this throughout the whole book. She believes she knows everything there is to know about him and judges him harshly and without reason at every turn. She also insults him constantly and thinks of him as less than a human being. Now, there is a line she will not cross, but, let me tell you, that line is too far out to be useful. She spends the ENTIRE book distrusting him, so their relationship is built on this distrust (on her end). Then, miraculously and for no reason at the very end of the book, Kate decides that, OMG, every single word out of Jed's mouth isn't a lie after all! And, OMG, Jed really is JED, and not playing a character to seduce me and my amazing irresistableness! And, OMG, I trust Jed! Then, the end.
Also, there is a random death that comes out of nowhere and seems unbelievably forced to add conflict. Jed's "breakdown" is glossed over and wrapped up in one single sentence, which made steam come out of my ears, because I waited the whole book for this to happen. Clearly, Brockmann was done with this story and just wanted to finsih asap.
But, despite this, it was an entertaining read, and when Kate had her few nice moments (most of which occured when she was stoned), I enjoyed myself.
April 18, 2015
A lot of people say this is a very different book for Brockmann, but only on the surface. Yeah, there are no cute FBI agents and hunky SEALs running around, but there are consistent themes.
The lead is an alcoholic (Robin in Troubleshooters, anyone?), who has had a troubled childhood and finds it impossible to express himself (hmmm Sam Starrett?).
Jericho Beaumont is sober and finding it almost impossible to find work as an actor after crashing and burning several years ago. Katie O'Laughlin has finally got financing for her screenplay to be made into a major picture and she doesn't want to hire Jericho. She draws up an impossible contract; he's desperate and agrees and thinks revenge.
For those expecting hearts and flowers, this ain't it. He's an ass, she's a bitch. But close quarters lead to detente, to friendship and sex.
There's no easy about this "romance" which makes the end satisfying. It's realistic.
A subplot about two teens actors moves more smoothly, which just goes to show that baggage can hurt.
The lead is an alcoholic (Robin in Troubleshooters, anyone?), who has had a troubled childhood and finds it impossible to express himself (hmmm Sam Starrett?).
Jericho Beaumont is sober and finding it almost impossible to find work as an actor after crashing and burning several years ago. Katie O'Laughlin has finally got financing for her screenplay to be made into a major picture and she doesn't want to hire Jericho. She draws up an impossible contract; he's desperate and agrees and thinks revenge.
For those expecting hearts and flowers, this ain't it. He's an ass, she's a bitch. But close quarters lead to detente, to friendship and sex.
There's no easy about this "romance" which makes the end satisfying. It's realistic.
A subplot about two teens actors moves more smoothly, which just goes to show that baggage can hurt.
September 9, 2009
This book was so different from her other books. There was no murder or mayhem in this one. Not a Navy SEAL in sight. I thought I wouldn’t like it, but I was wrong! I loved it! The main character was flawed but trying to redeem himself. The backdrop is a movie set, as the protagonists are an actor and a producer. The actor is a recovering addict who has to sign an outrageous contract to get the part. The story speaks to addiction and the daily struggle an Alcoholic has to face when they choose to stay clean and sober. The story also addresses the damage done to the trust people have in them. It was not just a love story, which is one of the things I love about this writer. I always walk away from her stories feeling like I learned something or, at the very least, broadened my perspective on a subject.
August 6, 2014
4.5 rating, narration was excellent. Been around a while this story, but I really liked it. Climbing out of his career slump is hard for an actor blacklisted due to poor on set behavior. But Jericho find redemption, love, friendship and self worth in a wonderful role, lots of depth in this writing...I felt as though I could
SEE the action. Not funny like SEP's Honey Moon but has a similar heart. Well done.
SEE the action. Not funny like SEP's Honey Moon but has a similar heart. Well done.
January 30, 2015
I listened to this on CD but I SO didn't like the heroine Kate that I stopped at the third disc. Perhaps I didn't give it a good go, but she was so ANNOYING I knew I would have trouble EVER forgiving her for her obtuse handling of this situation. Ignorant and painful.
No more of this authors stories - I just don't like her heroines!!
No more of this authors stories - I just don't like her heroines!!
March 20, 2012
VCR's, Payphones, and there was something else that was like "woah, 90s!"
I liked the story, though. Jericho was a nice character, although it was in Brockmann's earlier typical style of misunderstandings and lack of communication leading to hurt feelings!
Funny/tender scene with the LSD spiking, though.
I liked the story, though. Jericho was a nice character, although it was in Brockmann's earlier typical style of misunderstandings and lack of communication leading to hurt feelings!
Funny/tender scene with the LSD spiking, though.
September 15, 2009
Loved this book and the characters, too. Such a different book from SB's Troubleshooters. I liked the darkness of the story and how the characters overcame the adversities. Great romance, too!
December 19, 2010
I love this book and often re-read it. It's just so powerful in so many ways.
January 5, 2016
This was OK. Think I would have enjoyed it more if the audio book was read by a woman. It was kinda weird listening to a man.
February 19, 2016
Personaggi ben tratteggiati, una dipendenza ben affrontata..... un finale non scontato.... Brava davvero, Jed e Kate non me li toglierò facilmente dalla testa....
December 12, 2022
I don’t think I’ve met more unlikable main characters. I will fully admit to not knowing much about hollywood, but the requirements given to Jericho were absolutely horrible and that was the start of fulfilling the worst of the “career women” stereotypes. I don’t care that there were hints that she really was a nice person and she just put on the armor to be taken seriously. That doesn’t excuse the heartless and unreasonably harsh actions throughout. Instead it perpetuates annoying stereotypes. Moving on to Jericho… while I understand that if I was in his situation I’d be horrendously furious and a complete jerk as well. That said he felt like a grouchy billboard for sexual harassment. I recognize this was written in a different time, when I guess maybe this dynamic (grossly sexual hot lead and nightmare business lady with a nonexistent heart of gold that may pop up for a few seconds every once in awhile) was okay then, I really don’t appreciate it now.
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