All the Stars Align is the magical love story that is Taylor Swift’s Enchanted meets Cyrano, from the author of Ellie Haycock is Totally Normal.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Gretchen Schreiber’s All the Stars Align, which is out 1 April 2025.
All the women in Piper’s family know their true love at first sight, complete with butterflies, heart eyes, and a gut instinct. The kind of fated love that lasts forever. Piper grew up with her ancestors’ epic love stories repeated like fairy tales, and yearns for the day she’ll start her own. Already singled out in her family due to her physical disability, Piper collects a second strike against her when her parents announce their divorce, which convinces her family that she’s doomed.
When she finally finds her true love at a party, she’s more determined than ever to attain her love story and earn a spot in her family. But after completely botching their first meeting, she realizes that she’ll need help from her best friend Leo, who is sort of a love expert. The catch—he and Piper haven’t talked in six months, since he needed a “break” from their friendship.
To win over the love of her life and a place in her family, Piper must convince Leo to teach her his ways. And it’s all going as planned…until Leo confesses his own love for Piper. Now, she must decide: will fate choose her love, or will love choose her fate?
Chapter 1
A touch of Fate and all the stars align . . . That’s how every bedtime story started when I was a kid. Mom pulling the covers up to my chin and telling me about some great-great-great grandmother and how they met the greatest love of their life. On the sides of roads, in shops around the world. On this very Main Street. And more than anything, I am ready for my story to join theirs.
To be part of a long line of Hadley women whose true love is picked out for them by Fate.
The bus drops me off at the edge of Main Street. Mist threads between buildings, keeping the chill stitched tight around us even as we edge toward summer. But neither the gray days nor the last gasp of winter has stopped the tourists from coming. People looking for adventure and just a bit of magic.
The tour guide stands before the falls, her old lantern held aloft. Its soft light cuts through the fog, and bounces off the mist from the water, making her glow in the fading light. “Crescent Falls, our final stop . . .” She raises her voice, slightly to be heard over the noise of the falls.
Water tumbles over rocks into the crescent-shaped pool below that gave both the town its name and its main source of income. The town council always times the tours to end at golden hour because it feels like Fate might just peek out of the falls and bless a lucky tourist. Over the years, the town has expanded the pool, widened it, built up a retaining wall that’s now aesthetically covered moss and lichen. Plaques have been set into the stone telling people the legend of how Fate came to live here. At the end of tourist season, the town council will dredge the bottom of the pool for coins that tourists are encouraged to toss in as an offering to Fate.
I stop to listen to the guide even though I know this story backward, forward, and upside down—because it never grows old. I love it almost as much as I do the stories about my family, which I suppose, could be called one and the same. My family’s stories are all grand romances granted to us by Fate.
“Some say Fate lives here—legend even has it that some families in this town have been blessed by her hand. If you are lucky and offer her something she likes, she will grant you your heart’s desire.” And with a flourish, the tour guide flips a coin over her shoulder. It lands with an audible plop in the pool.
There have always been rumors about my family and its connection to Fate—some say we are fortune tellers, others witches, but we prefer to say we are blessed. Buried somewhere in the great-greats, so many that I cannot count them all, is the one who made a wish at the falls and blessed the rest of the Hadley line.
Her tour group applauds, and then they start to rummage in their pockets, searching for coins to tempt Fate. I halfheartedly wish for my own coin—just to bolster the gift Fate has given to every Hadley woman.
True love at first sight.
The Blessing has never failed to help us find love, not even for Great-Aunt Ida, who waited almost seventy years to feel the familiar tug that signaled Fate had finally found her person. I know their stories by heart. How Aunt Helena found love on the side of the road with a flat tire that should have spelled disaster. Aunt Shelly found her person at the airport and bought a ticket on the same flight just so they wouldn’t be parted. My parents . . . My mind skips, running into the imperfection of our family legacy.
I search the faces of the tourists, wanting to feel that pull, that tug, any indications that Fate has sent me my person. The one thing I know—I will not be my parents. I won’t give up on my true love.
A boy my age catches me looking. His gaze tracks from the coin in his hand to me and I catch just a brief hitch of surprise in his eyes before he smiles. I’m used to it, especially from tourists. Being disabled does that. Makes people stare just a bit longer, seemingly trying to peel back your skin to see what’s wrong with you. Sometimes it’s shocking—most people here have known me so long they don’t notice how I look different.
He walks over and holds out the coin to me, eyes full of mischief and a hint of boredom. Perhaps another girl would take him up on the diversion he’s offering. I hold his gaze, waiting for the Blessing, the feeling I’ve heard about from infancy—where happenstance becomes magic. First, the look. A sharpening. A knowing. The feeling of finally being complete. At least that’s how my aunts describe it. Then romance—dates, us growing closer, all leading up to a kiss—the time when we’re allowed to tell our love about the Blessing.
“Need a wish?” he asks, still holding out his coin.
There’s nothing. No shift or change. Just another boy on vacation with his family. I try not to let my heart sink.
“You keep it,” I tell him. There’s no point chasing someone who’s not your forever. I’ve . . . I know that. “I have to get to work.”
I don’t wait to watch his face fall into disappointment or anger. He’ll move on and find his someone. Eventually.
How terrible that must be to never know if that person you love, who you invest everything in, is really worth it. The thought sends shivers down my spine. No, thank you.
I hurry away from the falls toward Hadley’s Treasures. It sits in the middle of the block nestled between other brick facades. A bright blue-and-green-striped awning shades customers who want to window-shop.
My job—or should I say the family business—is a jewelry store. To preserve the town’s charm and tourist appeal, Main Street has kept its turn-of-the-century buildings. Old brick, arched windows, turrets on the corner buildings, they all make Crescent Falls feel like it could really be the place Fate chose to live.
The bell above the door jingles and I walk inside, breathing in the familiar scents of lemon polish and the lavender sachets that Aunt Shelly likes to slip under some of the displays, just to keep everything fresh. Hadley’s Treasures has been my favorite place since I can remember—my parents worked weekends and the aunts always brought me here. I made up games by the warm glow of lights in the old brass sconces, imagined stories for the jewels held in the wood and glass display cases. All the better to show off the designs within. At the back I can just make out the staircase that leads up to the open-air balcony, where Aunt Helena has her office so she can overlook the floor below.
One of my biggest achievements is when I convinced Aunt Helena to let me work here—a normal rite of passage for any Hadley offspring, but one she’d been hesitant, if not plain resistant, to bestow upon me.
My aunts all run the business together, just like my grandmother and her sisters did before them, and so on, all the way back to when the Hadleys first came here. We’re big on tradition in this family. And as much as some may find it constraining, I love it. These acts, these moments, are just tiny stitches that hold us together as a family.
From All the Stars Align, by Gretchen Schreiber. Copyright © 2025 by the author, and reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group
