Melissa Kantor

I picked up the book for the title and cover alone. I didn't really bother to read the back and really I wish I had.
The book took forever for me to get into, and it wasn't for lack of trying. The writing was perfect and the detail was great, I just felt like I couldn't connect to Lucy the main character. Okay, her mother is an artist that dies when she is a baby and then after so many years (she's a teenager) her father remarries and she has to move. I understand her not liking the new stepmother and the step-sisters, but really? She complains throughout the whole book, she has no friends, has a crush on the star basketball player and her dad is almost never home.
I guess after watching a hundred different Cinderella story movies and not really liking the whole Cinderella fairy tale to begin with, may have made me a little cynical while reading.
After everything in the boy and friend department starts going good for Lucy, she really changes and thinks that she is all that just because she is dating the star basketball player. It's a classic move with most authors and really turned me off the book. There is the normal, talk of them drinking, making out and al the stuff high schoolers are known to do. Lucy continues to have issues with her stepmother and the step-sisters, and of course she feels as though her father doesn't care about her because he is never there.
I had to keep reading after being almost done with it and of course Lucy had to start falling for someone else, and then all of a sudden she isn't happy with everything she has. The ending was too abrupt for me and I believe that Melisa could have gotten to that point faster and then expanded on it more.… (more)

Two stars, but only for chapter thirty-five on because that's when I felt anything besides boredom. This book, published in 2014, is one I am convinced was originally "A Time For Dancing" fanfiction. It's not so much Filing Serial Numbers Off as it is--not even Originality is For Losers. More of--like Belladonna Poisoning, only it would be Juliana Poisoning, or something. If I went through each book for similarity counts, the counts would get really high really fast. Only this book was really boring, and "A Time For Dancing" is not. I feel weird about just how similar the two are, right down to the book covers--both feature sunrises on beaches, and two young women. Melissa Cantor's book features two girls with their backs turned, dressed in winter clothes, while "A Time For Dancing" features two beautiful young women in long skirts dancing. I might--have to do counts for similarity to make myself feel better. This is not the review I posted on Goodreads because it sounds like I'm calling Cantor a plagiarist. It's not--it's like--the book got expanded in certain ways, and themes got more deeply explored. It's still fanfiction, though, I'm convinced.… (more)