Coming Soon Tuesdays #2: Stone Heart by Susan K. Hamilton ARC courtesy of Netgalley

 

Title: Stone Heart

Author: Susan K. Hamilton

Expected Release Date: August 30, 2022

The description provided by the publisher on Netgalley:

Lauren Stone is no stranger to regret...

A singer in a successful band, she's learned a hard lesson over the years: people don't love her for who she really is. They love what she is and what she can do for them. The only person who ever truly loved her ended their relationship years ago, and it nearly destroyed her. But Lauren doesn't have time to pine over lost love. If she doesn't get her songwriting mojo back-and fast-The Kingmakers' new album is going to be a colossal failure.

When Lauren returns home to New York for a recording session, a publicity stunt gone awry brings her face-to-face with her past and her biggest regret: Danny Padovano, the ex-boyfriend who broke her heart. The spark between them is still there but getting involved with Danny again is one step short of insanity. Lauren knows she's playing with fire-things are a lot more complicated now than they were when Lauren and Danny were younger, and the stakes are much, much higher. Soon, everything Lauren's worked so hard to achieve starts to unravel.

Can she come to terms with her regrets? Or will they finally destroy her?

Review: 

Spoilers beware!

I'm giving this 3.5 stars. I really enjoyed the writing style for the most part. It was one of those reads that kept me up well into the night without realizing it. I became very emotionally connected to the characters. I spent a fair amount of time bawling my eyes out in this one, which is a sign of good storytelling.

I wish the description mentioned that it has been about twenty years since they last saw each other. I didn't assume it was such a long time, I was thinking more like ten years tops, and I was slightly surprised by it being more. I would have understood why the stakes would be higher since Danny has been married with children for more than ten years at the point of their meeting again. So obviously, Danny and Lauren start up an affair. Why wouldn't they, after pining after each other for twenty years, that lasted for a few months with Danny saying over and over again that he's in an unhappy relationship with his wife, but through the whole affair with Lauren, all involved know it's going to end but Lauren, though trying to avoid the truth after the affair starts, is the only one completely honest about the fact that they have no future in the beginning when Danny first kisses her again. Danny is told point blank by her that she'll be leaving once the album is done, and her tour starts, but he's the one that instigates the whole affair by meeting up at her hotel penthouse suite on more than one occasion clearly with the ulterior motive to start something with her. Danny is so wishy-washy with his decisions, but it's also clear that he'd never want to leave his sons, especially after his wife takes them away when she first suspected the affair. Still, it seems she's been suspecting Danny's feelings for Lauren for years, and that was already a significant problem in their marriage even before Lauren came back into the picture. Everyone is telling Danny that he has to make a decision about who he wants to be with but like I said he clearly can't leave his sons. Hence, he chooses to end things with Lauren to stay with his wife and sons. Still, again at the end he decides he rather be with Lauren but Lauren is stronger now after going through their breakup. She firmly tells him again what she told them at the start of the affair that she's leaving. He wouldn't enjoy her lifestyle, which we've seen multiple times throughout the book, but he can't seem to get that through his brain. 

Lauren would say that none of her relationships worked out because no one loved her for her except Danny, but clearly, that wasn't true on both sides of their relationship. Lauren is the free spirit who needs to be on stage performing music, while Danny is reserved, a family man with no desire to leave New York. When he first ended their relationship at eighteen, these were the very reasons it had to end. They knew that those reasons still stood even before they started the affair.

A little more about the book...There's adultery (of course), drugs, kidnapping, and even murder! Okay, the last two are mentioned in passing as part of Danny's job as a police detective, which when it's first mentioned, threw me through a loop as up until that point (seventeen chapters in), nothing in the book was really dark and heavy. Yet, they hadn't even committed the adultery though there was mention of Lauren's past drug use. For the most part, the little snippets of Danny's job just reaffirm his love for his sons, as that is all he thinks about after dealing with the murder-suicide scene and the kidnapping. The main focus in the story is the adultery between Danny and Lauren, with Lauren's rehabilitation from cocaine second to that.

I think it's horrible how Lauren and her cousin/bandmate, Augie, blame her drug use on Danny, ending their relationship when they were eighteen as she abused drugs to lessen the pain from the loss of Danny. It just felt like they put a lot of the responsibility onto Danny and not where it belongs on Lauren with her mental state. There's even a whole emotional part after Danny breaks up with her for the second time where she's about to relapse. It felt, after all her talk about not needing drugs through most of the book, like a cop-out for Lauren because, in the end, she could blame Danny again for this. If she truly loved Danny, she wouldn't be blaming him or end up putting him in the position where he's the one to blame either for her relapse or her own suicide. I understand she was dealing with depression and wasn't thinking rationally. However, it seems they have been blaming Danny for years. She still put herself into a position to be with him again, which she knew wasn't healthy as she even called Danny her addiction that won't kill her. Thus just making Danny her current drug of choice. 

Here are a few things I wished that happened in this story. Clearly, there are some feelings from DJ, the keyboardist from the band for Lauren, he seems to write her a love song after they felt that they almost lost her after her breakup with Danny, but this isn't explored at all. I'm one for a happy ending all the way, and for me, that means someone ends up with someone they can truly be themselves with and love with all their hearts. We don't get that here. We don't even know what actually becomes of Danny as the end of the story focuses mainly on Lauren and her bandmates, though not a budding relationship between her and DJ, much to my chagrin. Danny is mentioned in passing at this point, and it shows that Lauren might finally truly be over him as she asked her sister to no longer give her update about him, but this leaves the reader with no clue about how his life ended up or how he's doing with the finality of their breakup.

I hoped that Danny's being a detective would play a little more in the story other than what I mentioned above about him thinking about his sons whenever something bad happened at work. I know this idea would make the book a totally different story than from the author wrote, but I think their third (first deliberate on Danny's side) meeting should have been official business for his job as he did use his badge to get up to see her. I wouldn't change a thing about their first reunion as I loved the setup for that, and their chance meeting the second time was also a nice little scene. I think if they were pushed together again for a third time by fate almost because of his job, which led to his first kiss, it would really give his wife a reason to be suspicious of him working late and spending time with Lauren. His wife has been suspicious of him working late for a while now. Even before and after Lauren returned, he worked long hours to support his family. His wife was so worried about Danny cheating and accusing him of doing so when he hadn't yet, but he heard it enough from her that he might as well be seeing Lauren even if they already said there's no future for them. Which is exactly what he does. He even uses the excuse that he was already paying for the crime, so he might as well do it.

I don't know when the author first started this, but a few of the real-life mentions are already dated. It mentioned Prince writing a song daily but in the present tense as if he's still alive and hasn't been gone for six years. The mention of actual people pulled me out of the story a little. I know she's a rock star that knows other rock stars, but I got distracted by this to the point that I was even Googling other characters to see if they were actual rock stars that I didn't know about because when you bring in Jon Bon Jovi into the story I get suspicious of everyone else being real as well. 

Overall this was a good read, and I did enjoy it, but again the rating will be 3.5 stars out of 5 from me as it's missing a true love story for me to look back on and say they made it. Yes, yes, I know you could say her career was her true love, and that is what she ends up with in the end. If I was truly meant to believe that, she wouldn't have her feelings of loneliness throughout the book. If it was shown that after her writer's block lift, so did the loneliness, I might be more inclined to believe she'll have a happy ending though that's not forever either. What will happen to her in a few years when she can no longer tour or make music? She was already having a hell of a time writing for this album until her breakup with Danny and her breakdown after that. What happens when she runs out of inspiration again? You can say all relationships have an end but Lauren's lifestyle already has a coming expiration date as she's already pushing forty during this story. I just don't want her to find herself alone in the future, turning to drugs. That is probably why I want it stated point blank that her and DJ found love with each other, and the band has never been stronger together. Something that gives me hope, that in a few years, when the Kingmaker's are really over the hill, that she's not turning back to drugs to numb the pain of her lost true love, the music.