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Take Two, Birdie Maxwell
Allison Winn Scotch
368 pages | Published by Berkley
Out March 5, 2024
The Set Up: After a storm of bad publicity, A-list actress Birdie Maxwell returns to her small town home to lay low. In her childhood bedroom she finds an unsigned letter asking her for a second chance. Birdie is sure that her quest to find her second-chance love will win back the public’s approval, so she enlists the help of Elliot, one of her childhood best friends and a well known journalist. Birdie and Elliot begin to track down her old boyfriends to find out where the letter came from, but the close quarters make it hard to ignore the feelings for each other that have been building for decades.
What kept me reading was the the second-chance childhood friends of it all. Other than that, this book missed the mark for me. I ended up skimming the last third or so.
I never really felt the chemistry between Birdie and Elliot, and I had a hard time liking Birdie for most of the book. The book didn’t flow for me - like I could feel the author trying really hard to write a compelling story.
I really liked The Rewind by AWS, so a lot of what didn’t work for me here surprised me. There felt like too many elements in Birdie’s backstory, or the story structure made it harder to understand than it should have. The Rewind had a back-and-forth element and I thought she executed it so well. This story doesn’t have time jumps like The Rewind, but it felt clunkier. The Rewind was also all nostalgia vibes - Birdie Maxwell didn’t give me any kind of atmosphere to sink into.
I really wanted to like this one but it just really wasn’t it for me.
Thanks to Netgalley & Berkley for the advanced e-book!
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