When you hear "gay teen celebrity boy band romance" it's an exciting concept--it makes you want to read. Sadly, this book ended up being a bit of a bore with a weird arc/pacing issues. The highlight of the story is its multimedia nature, where interwoven with the prose are text messages, new articles, interview snippets, and more. This is the most interesting feature of the book and I almost wonder what it would have been like if it had been told a la Daisy Jones and The Six. But as it stands, this was not a book where I was dying to find out what happened, and I wasn't even rooting for the love interests to be together. The author did such a good job of planting seeds of doubt about one's intentions that I wasn't even happy when (spoiler alert) they got back together in the end. With the barrage of boy band romances we have nowadays--e.g., When This Gets Out, Along for the Ride, K-Pop Confidential--it's hard to know which one to pick up. And, to be honest, none of them have quite hit the mark for me and taken the trope/premise to its full potential. Maybe one day...
Thanks to Penguin Teen for my eARC and BookishFirst for my finished copy raffle win! All thoughts and opinions are my own.
3 stars - 6/10
Thanks to Penguin Teen for my eARC and BookishFirst for my finished copy raffle win! All thoughts and opinions are my own.
3 stars - 6/10