booknuts_'s Reviews > Stars and Smoke

Anyone who is a fan of Korean or Chinese dramas, will thoroughly enjoy this cute book. I am a little unsure if this is more new adult or young adult. This has the content of YA but the ages of the main characters are of 19 and now-a-days it's kind of all blurred.

This started off totally like an Asian drama and I was eating it up, I was loving everything about it. It was just super cute. The narrator was absolutely wonderful and anyone who knows me, knows I'm very picky about my narrators because they can either make or break a book and this is no different. Good thing for me, this narrator was great and kept my attention throughout most of the book.

I really enjoyed our 2 main characters Sydney and Winter. Sydney was great, she comes from a terrible background who wanted a fresh start working with this organization to take down bad guys, wanting to make her life count, wanting to make her life mean something. However, she comes with a chip on her shoulder that bleeds into her interactions with Winter, our superstar-which I liked!

Just like in asian dramas, the superstar has a sad family dynamics and really is just misunderstood. Totally like asian dramas, again which is why the first half of this book had me glued and sucked in. It was all just cute. Winter is just a nice guy and it was sweet.

The interactions between Winter and Sydney only brought more to the story and it continued to just be everything you'd expect from asian dramas. For the first half I loved it.

This slightly over half way things started to change for me. The author randomly; out of nowhere; threw in a mention of LGBTQ that didn't make sense and was so out of left field if felt forced. It almost was like the author needed to check of that box so she just randomly threw it in there ONE time and left it at that. I thought that was just stupid. For those who wanted representation will be disappointed. It was very poorly done.

Then things changed for the better too quickly between Winter and Sydney. Their back and forth snippets at each other lost it's spark! If they (especially Sydney) really had a chip on their shoulder I would've liked to have seen more dislike towards each other. But, they all of a sudden got physical and it just didn't feel real to me. Their relationship moved on too quickly and after that the story just felt like any other cheesy YA story. There was no more depth to their relationship and I struggled to find the desire to finish their story.

Overall it started off so great and I was loving it then literally half way through it just died and wasn't fun anymore. just Meh. I would've hoped for more from this author and I just became disappointed.

Language: mild
Drugs/Alcohol: mild
Violence: mild
Sexual Content: mild
LGBTQ: yes just a random mention