He wanted to kiss her again, but it wasn’t in the script.
Latina soap star Jasmine Rodriguez is back in New York after a successful stint in LA that ended with a messy breakup and unwanted tabloid fame. She's put together a 'Leading Lady' plan -- 'Leading Ladies do not end up on tabloid covers. Leading Ladies don’t need a man to be happy.' and so on -- and is determined to make better choices. Filming's about to start on a new TV series, Carmen in Charge, in which Jasmine's romantic interest is played by heartthrob Ashton Suárez (who happens to be her grandmother's favourite telenovela star). But their first meeting doesn't go well (he spills coffee over her silk shirt and doesn't realise she barely speaks Spanish) and Ashton is -- for good reason -- an intensely private person, hard to get to know.
But this is a romance: we know how the story ends, even if the proto-couple are not great at communicating (in any language except perhaps Body). The ending is almost certain; it's the journey that is unpredictable. I enjoyed the chapters that focuses on script and filming, and 'Carmen' and 'Victor' overcame their issues: Daria was great at showing how Jasmine and Ashton brought their own experiences to those roles. (Also loved the intimacy coordinator, and the LGBTQ+ representation in the cast!) And I was impressed by the epilogue, in which both characters are shown dealing with their long-standing emotional baggage.
This is the first in a trilogy, 'Primas of Power', featuring Jasmine and her cousins: the cousins have plenty to say in this novel, mostly about Jasmine's poor choices and about the issues shared by many Latino men. They're balanced, in this novel, by glimpses of Ashton's family: I really liked his father. And another aspect I appreciated was that, though some individual words or whole sentences were in Spanish, the meaning was clear from the context.
Emotionally and warmly narrated by Seraphine Valentine, who managed the sex scenes with aplomb!
Read because: my Libro.fm Audiobook challenge had a prompt for 'audiobook by a Latine author'.
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