4.5 stars
Bailey “Mink” Rydell and “Alex” have been chatting on a movie message board for months and both absolutely love classic movies. They have hit it off to the point where “Alex” invites “Mink” to his hometown to come see North by Northwest at an outdoor screening on the beach at the annual film festival being arranged in Coronado Cove.
Bailey’s parents got divorced a few years back, and now that Bailey’s mother seems to be divorcing her new husband as well, Bailey has chosen to go stay with her father, who coincidentally lives in the same little surfer town in California as her online friend, “Alex”. While she really wants to meet up with the guy she’s pretty much developed a crush on, Bailey isn’t stupid, and knows that people you meet online may not always be who they appear to be. So she doesn’t want to let him know she’s in Coronado Cove and she intends to track “Alex” down in the months before the film festival, to make sure he’s actually a good guy.
While still keeping up her online conversations with “Alex”, never letting him know that she’s moved from New Jersey to California, Bailey also gets a summer job at the local museum, a huge mansion devoted to Golden Age Hollywood memorabilia, where she makes a friend in Grace and an enemy in Porter Roth, the sarcastic security guard who seems to delight in making her life a living hell. While she wants to hate Porter, Bailey can’t deny he’s pretty hot, and as the weeks pass, their enmity seems to be turning into something else. In her free time, she’s still trying to track down “Alex” based on clues she’s gleaned from their online conversation, but as the summer progresses, her quest gets side-tracked as her relationship with Porter keeps changing into something a lot more interesting. What Bailey doesn’t know, of course, is that her erstwhile tormentor and enemy turned enigmatic love interest and her online movie buddy are one and the same. What will she do when she discovers that Alex and Porter are in fact the same person?
Full review on my blog.