Book Review: Star-Crossed by Minnie Drake
I’ve been reading a lot of mystery/thrillers of late, so I was really looking forward to a bit of fun romance and Star-Crossed sounded like it was going to tick all the boxes but…
I had a few issues, for starters, with the main thrust of the plot. Our heroine, Justine, works at a magazine and decides to alter/edit the horoscopes before publication so that her friend/childhood sweetheart, Nick, will, after reading them, be persuaded by their messages so much that he’ll realise he should become romantically involved with Justine. Whilst this seems to backfire spectacularly month after month, her new readings do, however, unintentionally influence a plethora of minor characters. Yes, my big issue is that I can’t really imagine anyone taking readings in a magazine so seriously. I mean, really, who takes anything they read in a magazine seriously? Yet, our leads, along with a dozen or so supporting characters, make major life decisions based on a horoscope column.
The stories featuring these supporting characters are interspersed throughout and unfortunately they did not have as much of an impact on me as I felt they should. Most were a little bland; I never laughed out loud, nor did I well up with tears. Each short story was okay but that was all. In fact, when one of the most interesting characters is a dog (especially when I loathe fiction written from an animal’s point of view), you know you’ve lost me.
The main characters, too, were not as likeable as I would have liked and Nick and Justine really lacked chemistry. When Drake threw in another character, effectively creating a love triangle, I must admit I wasn’t sure who was going to win out in the end.
I did like Drake’s descriptive passages. I liked the pacing of the interspersed stories, effectively giving them a rom-com movie feel. Maybe it would work better as a movie though because I did sometimes get mixed up with who was who. Maybe the characterisation was not as great as it should have been; or the plots were too weak. Drake also tried to add in too many twists with the supporting stories. Maybe less could have been more?
The same could be said for much of the book. It’s definitely too long. Maybe 100 pages less and some of the boredom I felt could have been skipped. Then there was the repetition of the which character was which star sign, and which rising sign, and how their personality was influenced by these signs and what reading was relevant to them etc etc etc. It got a bit much.
I will say I believe in the stars; definitely in the personality traits that are assigned to a person once they’re born under a certain star. Even as a believer, I struggled. If you think it’s all a load of rubbish, you will be in real trouble.
So, Lee, Capricorn, who should have guessed a book which gives such prominence to an Aquarius would never be her thing, gives Star-Crossed 2 and ½ [Scorpio rising] stars.
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