Today's review is one of Josi Kilpack's earlier works from 2004 called I Am Delilah (Originally titled Star Struck.) It's tough to classify this one. It's not a romance. It's not women's fiction. It's not a mystery. It's just a story about a small town girl and an A list actor whose paths cross briefly.
Sam Hendricks has worked hard to be a good actor. He's up for an Academy Award and each year he takes a plain girl, makes her over, and then she becomes his date for the Oscars. This year, however, he chooses a girl who says no. On camera. It's a publicity nightmare and he'll do anything to fix it---including spend two weeks working on her family's dairy farm.
Delilah doesn't want to have anything to do with Sam or his glamorous lifestyle. She thinks she has the perfect plan for him to leave her alone---make a deal that if he works the dairy farm for two weeks, then she'll say yes to going to the Oscars with him. In her mind, there's no way this pampered actor will ever be able to get through two weeks of hard work.
Of course Sam takes the challenge and the rest of the story is how he slowly changes through his experience with Delilah and her family. Sam starts to see things through a different lens and his perspective slowly changes. It was a nice story, but I wish there would have been a little romance, though. It was missing that Josi Kilpack spark without it. Since this is a re-release there were also several editing errors and missing words, but not enough to distract from the story. Since it was written over ten years ago, they didn't have all the modern day conveniences of smart phones and such, which made me see how much the world has changed in such a short time. Overall, this story had a setting that was easy to imagine and solid characters that project a message about being true to yourself, A nice afternoon read.
Here's the back copy:
Although Delilah works in New York, she’s a small-town girl and eager to finish her job as a nanny and return to Big Fork Montana where she’ll marry her high-school sweetheart. When she ends up the focus of a Hollywood stunt centered around her being the Oscar date of Hollywood heartthrob Sam Hendricks, life as she knows it becomes a thing of the past. Delilah promptly refuses him, only to find that it isn’t so easy to step out of the limelight once you’ve ended up in the middle of the public eye.
Sam Hendricks is not used to taking no for an answer, and when his rejection become a leading story, he determines to do whatever it takes to turn the tide of public opinion back in his favor. Again and again Delilah refuses him until she proposes an offer—if he’ll spend two weeks on her family’s dairy farm, she’ll be his date to the Oscars. In no way is this a fair trade, but Sam feels he has no choice and therefore agrees to her proposal—they both agree no one will ever know.
Unfortunately for them both, there are plans other than their own at play, and when everything goes wrong they are faced with another fallout, bigger than the first.
You can download your Kindle copy here
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