Howdy YAL!

Catch a falling star and put it in your pocket…

That song has stuck with me ever since I saw The Princess Diaries.

And speaking of The Princess Diaries, this book does remind me a lot of Meg Cabot’s novel, Teen Idolthough that book was better written.  It also reminds me a lot of the Disney movie, Star Struck, though this book was better than that movie.

So what does that mean for Catch a Falling Star well it was okay.

Not great.

But okay.

It’s what I expected.  To be honest, I really don’t think it was worth being a hardback-it was more or less paperback worthy.  But at the same time I didn’t outright hate it and felt like I wasted my time.

The plot is pretty simplistic.  A girl gets hired to pretend to be some Zac Efron wannabe’s fake girlfriend. If you’re expecting a cute romance between the two of them, don’t get your hopes up.  I didn’t get the thrills between Carter and Adam.  Really, Adam is just man candy.  However, as far as YA go I’ve seen worse relationships.

In fact, the interactions between the two leads is probably one of the weakest points of the novel.  With the way the novel is pitched, I really thought the whole Carter/Adam relationship would’ve been the most prominent feature of the novel, but it’s not.  Carter more or less plays the role that Luke Strikler does in Cabot’s Teen Idol except while Cabot acknowledges that Luke and Jen have little to no chemistry and does not have them end up together, Culbertson does the opposite.  And man these two are boring together.

Also, Luke had much more personality than Adam.  This might have been in part because Culbertson focused the book so much on Carter.  And to be honest, I really didn’t think I got to know her.  Oh, I knew enough about her but the explanations of her motives.  They really didn’t make much sense to me. Let’s look at a few of them:

• Carter quits dancing because she can’t have fun all the time.

Well, it’s a little bit more than that, but not much.  Seriously, though nothing is 100% fun except for bad TV.  And that can just get annoying, so I guess that’s not fun either.  The lack of ambition that this character had though was astounding.

• She basically begs to ho herself out for her brother.

Really.  Instead of letting her brother face the consequences for his action, she hooks up with a movie star.  Well, fake hooks up.  But still.

• I still don’t understand her blog.

Astronomy, UFOs, movie stars.  Well, I’ll just ask the folks at Ancient Aliens.

So, yeah.  When it comes to it, I really had ambiguous feelings about this character.  Based on the three examples I just wanted to smack her, but she wasn’t the worst character I read about.  Even though she was annoying beyond belief.

I know the examples I gave of her, aren’t that flattering.  And Carter was damn annoying a good half of the time, but she had her moments.  As I said before I just wished there was some logic to her choices.  If there was, I might have liked her a little better.  The explanations we got though…

What I do think I liked about this book if I had to pick one thing was its simplicity.  I needed something low key and the book delivered on that aspect.  The small town aspect was also nice to read about.  It had almost a Stars Hallow vibe to it.  Except the Gilmores and their fellow town-folks were a lot more interesting.

Overall Rating: I think a solid B.  And I’ll be honest, I’ve read lots of B grade books that have been better, but I’m rating this a B based on the expectations of this book.  I never expected it to be great.  I just wanted a light summer read and Catch a Falling Star  delivers.