Colton Gentry's Third Act
A Novel
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Apr 30, 2024
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- $19.99
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- Pre-Order
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Recommended by The TODAY Show, this "story of love, healing, and second chances ” (Emily Henry) from an award-winning author follows a down on his luck country musician who, in the throes of grief after a shocking loss, moves back home and rekindles a relationship with his high school sweetheart.
Colton Gentry is riding high. His first hit in nearly a decade has caught fire, he’s opening for country megastar Brant Lucas, and he’s married to one of the hottest acts in the country. But he’s hurting. Only a few weeks earlier, his best friend, Duane, was murdered onstage by a mass shooter at a country music festival. One night, with his trauma festering and Jim Beam flowing through his veins, Colton stands before a sold-out arena crowd of country music fans and offers his unfiltered opinion on guns. It goes over poorly.
Immediately, his career and marriage implode. Left with few choices or funds, he retreats to his rural Kentucky hometown. He’s resigned himself to has-been-dom, until a chance encounter at his town’s new farm-to-table restaurant gives him a second shot at life: a job working in the kitchen with Luann, his first love, who has undergone her own reinvention. Told through perspectives alternating between his senior year of high school, his time coming up with Duane as hungry musicians in Nashville, and the present, COLTON GENTRY’S THIRD ACT is a story of coming home, undoing past heartbreaks, and navigating grief, and is a reminder that there are next acts in life, no matter how unlikely they may seem.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this swoon-worthy romance, the adult debut from YA author Zentner (In the Wild Light), a country singer-songwriter's life falls apart in the wake of a mass shooting. It's 2015 and B-list performer Colton Gentry, 38, is finally on the rise with a popular song about his high school girlfriend, Luann, which he wrote while his marriage to superstar Maisy Martin began to flounder. After his best friend is killed during a mass shooting, Colton speaks out against rampant gun ownership, and angry gun-toting country music fans make him a pariah. Drunk during a show, Colton responds to a group of hecklers who call him a "libtard" with one career-ending sentence: "fuck you and your guns." Maisy, who's already having an affair with a hockey player, divorces Colton, and he returns from Nashville to his hometown in Kentucky, remembering all the previous ways he messed up his life from drinking, starting with Luann. The two reconnect, and Colton accepts her offer to work at her farm-to-table restaurant as her sous-chef. Zentner gets the reader rooting for Colton to find his second chance with Luann by developing their tender teen love story through flashbacks—in one, set during Christmas 1996, Luann gives Colton a leather guitar strap and he gives her a bonsai tree, "like Mr. Miyagi had in Karate Kid." Fans of wholesome Americana will lap this up.