Beyond the Lights by Nicole Higginbotham-Hogue
- Publisher: Self-Published, June 19th 2020
- Genre: Romance, LGBTQ+, Novella
- Format: Ebook (eARC)
- Page Count: 108 pages
- My Rating: ★★ (2/5)
Content warnings: mention of death of a side character’s parent
Beyond the Lights is a cute novella with great potential. I liked the premise but the writing style threw me off a little and the plot was a bit more absurd than I had expected.
Sawyer Johnson (23) is convinced that she is in love with actress Amy Mitchell, whom she has never met before. When she announces her plan of going cross-country to find Amy, her best friend Autumn Thompson (~23, lesbian), who is secretly in love with Sawyer, decides to tag along, hoping for some quality time together. All plans go out the window as they run into Amy filming a movie in a small town in Montana.
It wasn’t easy to connect with Sawyer since her obsession with Amy was fully established before the story. I kept having the thought of her not being ultimately good enough for Autumn; that is not to say Autumn is flawless, however. There were a lot of things Sawyer did out of ignorance and Autumn out of spite. While very relatable, it made Sawyer’s final revelation as well as Autumn’s decision too sudden and underexplored. I ended up loving Autumn’s friend Dawn so much more than I did the two main characters.
Usually, I can overlook writing issues if the plot were great, but sadly, it is not the case here. There were so many instances of “the other woman” it became difficult to read after some point, and the timeline was also a bit off. I sometimes couldn’t tell if things happened in the same day or several days had passed. And, while possible, it wasn’t entirely believable that someone with zero experience of acting could pull off whatever Sawyer had. Throughout the book, too many words were used for self-analyzing and while I’m all for internal dialogues, it kept the story from reaching its true potential as a novella.
The one thing that really made me pause was the constant reiteration of Sawyer’s and Autumn’s virginities, how they are both “saving” themselves for the right woman—Sawyer for Amy and Autumn for Sawyer. It was supposed to be romantic, I guess, but it just made me very uncomfortable.
Beyond the Lights was a quick read with some light graphic sex, but sadly, not a story I would revisit. [5 Oct 2020]
I received an e-ARC from the author via Booksprout in exchange for an honest review.
