LOVE ON TOUR

In Adams’ romance novel, a young woman is befriended by a country music star and finds herself falling in love with his tour manager.

The story opens as Christine Matthews, a professional song-plugger, races to the Country Music Awards in Nashville. Unfortunately, she’s running late, and the doors are about to close; she takes a messy tumble to the sidewalk and loses her opportunity to enter the venue. As luck would have it, the country music scene’s current heartthrob, Austin Garrett, is just pulling up in his tour bus when Christine falls (“She was humiliated enough without having to face the newest hunk in country music”). He recognizes her as the person who pitched him his recent hit song, and he invites her to attend the show as his date. From there, the pair begins to develop a complicated friendship, with Austin acting sometimes like a helpless younger brother and at other times like a romantic hopeful. Christine, however, is much more interested in Austin’s tour manager, Matt Miller, than she is in country’s newest pinup. Matt assumes Christine only has eyes for Austin, and she, in turn, believes he’s committed to another woman. When the media presents Christine as Austin’s newest girlfriend, she receives a flood of cruel comments online, bringing up past traumas and complicating her relationships with Austin and Matt even further. Told from Christine’s perspective, this plot-driven story is relatively fast-paced and engaging. However, many of the plot points strain credulity—the speed with which Austin adopts Christine as his closest friend and confidante feels like a stretch. Similarly, there are so few meaningful interactions between Christine and Matt in the first half of the book that it’s difficult to understand why she is so smitten with him. Readers learn precious little about Matt as a character, or what about him appeals to Christine. Even so, as the misunderstandings pile up, the author does an admirable job of rendering characters with complex issues of self-doubt while also pulling back the curtain on the Nashville music scene.

A lighthearted romance, pleasant despite its lack of plausibility.