1. We'll Never Be Apart, by Emiko Jean: I really, really enjoyed this book. It was very cheesy, but I couldn't help loving it. One review I read by a particularly tough critic on Goodreads said that there was little to no character development and the entire plot relied on a twist that many readers have seen before. Well, let me tell you, the twist in question? I'd never seen that before. When I told one of my friends about this twist, she sighed and said, "Predictable." But I didn't think it was predictable at all! Granted, this was the first psychological thriller I've read that can also be classified as YA, so maybe I just got lucky in that I'd never seen a twist like that before. The ending reminded me of E. Lockhart's We Were Liars, which I also loved. Going back to the character development dig: I think the book does have a lot of interesting character development. The main character, Alice, is deeply flawed and we learn why she's like this over the course of the relatively short novel (279 pages), so I completely disagree with that critic's opinion. I also really enjoyed how Alice's journal was incorporated into the plot for backstory. It might've been a bit better if the journal was in first person and the rest of the narration was in third person, but I'm choosing to overlook that. Very entertaining. 4/5 stars.
2. The Promise of Stardust, by Priscille Sibley: This book. THIS DAMN BOOK. My god. Where do I even start? Usually, when you see a review opening like that, it means the person liked the book, but let's get one thing straight. I did not like The Promise of Stardust. It is hands down one of the single most inconsistent novels I've ever read. I bought this book three years ago at Target when I was on vacation in Florida and I completely forgot it ever existed until I found it at the bottom of a pile of books in my bedroom a couple months ago, so I decided to finally give it a shot. The book opens with Dr. Matt Beaulieu, a neurologist who gets word that his wife, Elle, has fallen and suffered a bad head injury. As a result, she becomes braindead, and just as everyone is making peace with the fact that they will have to let her go, they find out Elle is pregnant. She's had numerous miscarriages, and because Matt knows how much Elle wanted a child, he wants to keep Elle alive on life support so the baby can have a chance. Matt's mother Linney, a nurse, as well as Elle's younger brother Christopher, strongly oppose keeping Elle alive because her mother, Alice, was kept alive while gravely ill for an extended period of time and they know Elle didn't want to die that way. They're already in court before the book has reached 100 pages. Not only that, the only backstory we have up until over 100 pages in is details the characters have said. Thereafter, some chapters shift to up to twenty years in the past, but it's basically just Matt continuing to recount the past to the reader, which I found really uncreative. Matt isn't a good narrator or a very good character, either. He fights dirty to keep Elle alive because he knows how much she wanted a baby. Never once do we hear how much Matt wanted to be a father. It was completely one-sided. It's also evident that this is Sibley's first novel. In my opinion, she tries way too hard to make her writing style comparable to that of Jodi Picoult. The premise is an interesting concept, but the writing style completely destroys any potential it had. I expected this book to be a cheesy romance, and boy oh boy, it definitely is, but it's written so amateurishly that it was almost hard to overlook it. I had trouble finishing the book. The legal mumbo jumbo is boring, the romance is unbearably cliché, and the characters are not all that interesting. 2/5 stars.
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