Review Detail

When the blurb says that Jody's addicted to Jackson Gatlin, frontman of The Regulators, that was putting it mildly. She's quite obsessed, believing that if they were to meet, he'd fall hopelessly in love with her because he's the only person in the world that could ever possibly begin to understand her as a person. Jody's almost positive that she'll get her chance at the concert, she just has to get him to notice her in the crowd. They'll make eye contact, stars will align, and he'll be hers forever because they're soul mates.

Well, that's not exactly how things worked out. As we all know, real life has a way of taking your dreams and tossing it to the wind sometimes. Jody makes it to the concert, but it's only after waiting in a queue all day, getting thrown up on by a drunk guy, racing to the front of the mosh pit and getting squeezed to death by the rambunctious crowd, and pummeled by security that she finally gets her moment with Jackson and it doesn't last long at all.

In a crazy tangle of events, Jody ends up kidnapping Jackson, but he's nothing like the guy that she had built him up to be in her head. In actuality, he's a desperate junkie and an incredibly rude jerkface who ends up clinging to Jody because he wants away from the spotlight, his suffocating manager, and his life as a rockstar. However, with the whole world missing their favorite frontman, how long can she keep him hidden in her grandpa's old garage while he detoxes?

My Opinion: Man, when I read the blurb for this book on Goodreads and saw the cover, I was desperate to get my hands on it. Luckily for me, Jen from Jenuine Cupcakes: The "Pusher" of Books & Cupcakes , allowed me to borrow the ARC she received from Scholastic and I was over-the-moon excited about it. Sadly, though it was a relatively good novel, this book turned out to be nothing that I thought it was going to be. I suppose I had imagined it to be this tale of a struggling rockstar battling with his inner demons and the outlandish string of events that lead to this girl kidnapping him and when they fell in love, she'd help him see the good in the world again. Well, in a way, that was almost the story I got, but the love was more of a brotherly-sisterly bond and the journey to his recovery was one hell of an uphill battle. Even if I was able to suspend belief and realize this was a work of fiction, some aspects of the story were so out there that I found it rather challenging to connect with the story and the characters, particularly Jody and Jackson.

I did appreciate the focus of how we generally place people, especially celebrities, on pedestals and how we forget that at the end of the day, they're human just like the rest of us. Furthermore, the idea that we can become so infatuated with someone that we fail to see that we have the best potential love right in front of us. Luckily, Jody wised up to Mac before it was too late and their declaration at the end gave me all the warm and fuzzy feelings. Mackenzie and Cree were the best things about this story!