Secret Under the Stars

Lucky Stars #3

by Elizabeth Bevarly

 As far as he can see, all signs point to love in New York Times bestselling author Elizabeth Bevarly's latest Lucky Stars novel!

He’s looking for love.  

She's looking to get even. 

Every fifteen years, Comet Bob streaks over the skies of Endicott, Indiana, granting wishes. So when his only love, Marcy Hanlon, returns, Max Tavers believes his wish is coming true. But Marcy has different intentions—she secretly plans to expose Max as the cause of her wealthy family’s downfall! She’ll happily play along and return his affections. But if he’s the reason her life went so wrong, why does being with him feel so right?

Genres: Romance

279 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published October 25, 2022

About the author

Elizabeth Bevarly was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky and earned her BA with honors in English from the University of Louisville in 1983. Although she can’t recall ever wanting to be anything but a novelist-oh, all right, she toyed briefly with becoming an archaeologist, until she realized how awful she looked in khaki and flannel, and there was a brief fling with the interior decorator thing, until she realized she had trouble distinguishing chintz from moiré, and… (Where was I? Oh, yeah. My brilliant career.) Anyway, her career side trips before making the leap to writing included stints working as a bartender, a waitress, a movie theater cashier, a soap-hawker for Crabtree & Evelyn, an apparel-hawker for The Limited, and a bridal registry consultant for a major department store. She also did time as an editorial assistant for a medical journal, where she learned the correct spellings and meanings of a variety of words (like microscopy and histological) which, with any luck at all, she will never use again in this life.

She wrote her first novel when she was twelve years old. It was 32 pages long-and that was with college rule notebook paper-and featured three girls named Liz, Marianne and Cheryl, who explored the mysteries of a haunted house. Her friends Marianne and Cheryl proclaimed it “Brilliant! Spellbinding! Kept me up past dinnertime reading!” Those rave reviews only kindled the fire inside her to write more.

Since sixth grade, Elizabeth has gone on to complete more than 60 works of contemporary romance. Her novels regularly appear on the USA Today and Waldenbooks bestseller lists, and The Thing About Men was a New York Times Extended List bestseller. She’s been nominated for the prestigious RITA Award, has won the coveted National Readers’ Choice Award, and Romantic Times magazine has seen fit to honor her with two-count ‘em TWO-Career Achievement Awards. Her books have been translated into two dozen languages and published in three dozen countries, and there are more than ten million copies in print worldwide. She has claimed as residences Washington, DC, northern Virginia, southern New Jersey and Puerto Rico, but she now resides back in her native Kentucky with her husband and son and two very troubled cats where she fully intends to remain.

Reviews

[Harlequin Books]

Multicultural & Interracial Romance, Small Town & Rural Fiction, Family Life Fiction, Contemporary Romance
Miniseries
Lucky Stars (Book #3)

[Becky Tatar]

No stars. First of all, silly premise, mentioned in the previous volumes' reviews. Second, the lead guy in this, Max Travers is a 15 year old girl with a crush inside a grown man's body. I was waiting for him to start writing Marcy's name in his notebook with little hearts, or change her name to Marci and put a little heart over the i. Oh, wait, he did. put their initials in the logo of his business. Marcy left town at 15 with her family, who basically treated him like dirt. He has this perfect doll set up on a pedestal. And Marcy is back in town, searching for her writing muse again, after divorcing her celebrity husband. And better than anyone, Marcy knows she's not perfect. Can't recommend this series at all.

[BooksLoveBrains · Rating 2 out of 5]

The premise is interesting (the premise being the wish-granting comet), the writing is good, but this isn’t for me.

First, miscommunication trope. Second, the characters think so much - we’re told everything basically, instead of anything really happening, and it makes the book so slow. I literally skipped like 90 pages and it felt like I didn’t miss anything (I somehow got lucky enough to land on the climax of the story). Third, third-act breakup.

[Kim Schellin-Rog · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyable read. I liked that it was a somewhat different plot of a wish on a comet that comes by every 15 years. I also enjoyed that it was a mixed race couple as the main characters.