I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
I really wanted to like this book, I’m typically a sucker for a Romeo and Juliet retelling, but this book was just not my cup of tea.
Jerzie felt very immature, more immature than her age of sixteen, turning seventeen would have led me to expect her to be. She’s constantly making the worst possible decisions for herself, including doing illegal things to try to impress the 19-year old that she’s in instant love, despite the fact that those actions are still illegal for him too.
The love triangle as the main conflict of the story disappointed me as a reader hoping for a plot that mirrored Romeo and Juliet at least as much as the musical within the novel did. If the musical didn’t exist as the foil for the story’s narrative, I would never have guessed that this was supposed to be a modern Romeo and Juliet retelling. The introduction of Zeppelin was super cheesy and relied on super stereotypical cliches, such as describing his eyes as extremely blue, but using three totally different types of blue to describe his eyes, and focusing on how he smells to the main character, this went on for a long enough time of describing how perfect he was that it made me uncomfortable to read.
The author’s focus on grounding this story as explicitly happening around this time in pop culture felt heavy-handed to me and I feel will lead to the novel feeling almost immediately dated as a contemporary novel. The constant remarks on current broadway shows and pop stars made it so that the book is definitely grounded in the current, but also that in just a few years, people may have no idea what is being referred to other than probably Hamilton, and it honestly may have been better to just make up show names, and celebrity names if they needed to be used at all.
I’m sure that the right audience for this book is out there, but for me, it just didn’t click.