From the publisher:
One of Amazon’s Best Romances of October!
Space is the last thing an event planner and an astronaut need in this charming new romantic comedy from New York Times bestselling author Samantha Young.
When event planner Hallie Goodman receives party-inspiration material from the bride of her latest wedding project, the last thing she expects to find is a collection of digital videos from Darcy’s ex-boyfriend. Hallie knows it’s wrong to keep watching these personal videos, but this guy is cute, funny, and an astronaut on the International Space Station to boot. She’s only human. And it’s not long until she starts sending e-mails and video diaries to his discontinued NASA address. Since they’re bouncing back, there’s no way anyone will ever be able to see them…right?
Christopher Ortiz is readjusting to life on earth and being constantly in the shadow of his deceased older brother. When a friend from NASA’s IT department forwards him the e-mails and video messages Hallie has sent, he can’t help but notice how much her sense of humor and pink hair make his heart race.
Separated by screens, Hallie and Chris are falling in love with each other, one transmission at a time. But can they make their star-crossed romance work when they each learn the other’s baggage?
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An astronaut and a party planner fall in love, but both have to deal with their very messy families and their own past mistakes. Chris was dating Darcy for a couple of years before his mission to the Space Station, where he was stationed for five months. During his time up there, he recorded videos to send home to Darcy. But when he got back, he found out she was cheating on him and he ends their relationship. Darcy gets engaged to the other man, and a party planner works on their engagement party.
Hallie is the party planner, and she is a real people-pleaser, which isn’t a bad thing in her line of work. While working on the engagement party, Darcy emails her a file with the pertinent information, but doesn’t know (or care) that she also included all the videos that Chris had sent her. Hallie starts watching the first one, realizes that this is personal and she probably shouldn’t be watching it, but she is so drawn to Chris that she just can’t help herself. She watches all the videos, then feels so guilty she decides to record her own, apologizing for watching them, and sends them to the email address from the videos. When Chris gets Hallie’s video, he is annoyed that she watched his at all, and tells NASA to have it look like her email bounced. Undeterred, Hallie decides she like recording videos that no one will see, and she does a few more and they all bounce.
Little does she know that Chris has been watching her personal videos, and he is smitten with the party planner with the pink hair. When his ex invites him to the engagement party, he figures that Hallie will be there so he goes. That’s a long meet-cute, but it works. Chris and Hallie hit it off, especially when the first thing she does is apologize to him for watching his videos. But he likes her too much to admit he did the same, he wants to get to know her first.
Hallie and Chris fall into a friendly relationship. He is at a crossroads in his life; he resigned from the Air Force, and he knows he doesn’t want to go back out into space, but until he figures out his next move, it doesn’t seem fair to get involved in a romantic relationship, as much as he likes Hallie. And Hallie is falling for Chris, too – until he friend-zones her.
The ups and downs of their relationship keep them both reeling, not to mention they both have a lot of family issues they are also dealing with. But this is a romance, and even though the odds seem insurmountable, love always wins out. At least in fiction it does.
This was an engaging story with interesting characters, a bit of heat, and the requisite happy ending. I didn’t know a whole lot about astronauts and the Space Station, so I really enjoyed learning more about that, which was just the icing on the cake. A Cosmic Kind of Love is my kind of book – don’t miss it!
A COSMIC KIND OF LOVE by Samantha Young. Berkley (October 18, 2022). ISBN: 978-0593438619. 416p.
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