Title: Rewrite The Stars
Author: Charleigh Rose
Release Date: November 2, 2018
★★★★½
** Kindle Unlimited
Evangeline Thorne is privileged.
Beautiful and popular, if not a little jaded.
A chance encounter with a green-eyed stuntman sets off a chain of events that turns her perfect, little world upside down.
Short on options and desperate for adventure, she joins the traveling carnival for the summer.
Thrust into a world full of drama, deception, and secrecy, Evangeline tries to find herself and protect her heart in the process.
Sebastian McAllister is cursed.
He knows better than to think otherwise.
He’s content to live out the rest of his life traveling the country as one of the four Sons of Eastlake, seeking thrills the only way he knows how.
The one thing he doesn’t see coming is the spoiled blond with stars in her eyes.
The only problem is, the more time he spends with her, the more hope starts to stir in his dormant heart.
Too bad hope is a dangerous thing when you’re a McAllister.
I honestly feel like I scrolled past this a million times before I really looked at it and I can't believe it took me so long to get on board. Seriously, this book was just so damn enjoyable for me.
I was starting to sort of feel like there was a sameness to everything I had been reading - which is obviously more my fault than anyone else's - so picking up something with a premise that was so unlike anything else I had ever read was great. The setting of the travelling carnival was a brilliant choice, in my opinion, and gave me a sort of adult summer camp feeling that I just loved and really drew me in.
I talk a lot about characters feeling real and making sense and this book absolutely nailed that for me. Evan felt very much, to me, like a product of her experiences and I felt like I saw real growth that made sense over the course of the book. I also feel like she could have been really, really easy to dislike, but there was a balance of vulnerability and determination that really made me feel connected to her. I think it can be really easy to choose one of two sort of generic, uninteresting characterizations when it comes to a character who went from profound privilege to very real struggle and I feel like this book avoids that entirely by finding a really human balance to her.
Sebastian was also pretty dreamy to me. Like with Evan, I feel like there was a human element that was captured in his characterization that felt really well fleshed out and also very much a product of his circumstances. He definitely managed to be that sort of guarded, intense type of character in a way that didn't feel like there was no good reason for it - and the reason for it was so incredibly unique and handled in a way that I absolutely loved. It was a little bit out there, but it also felt perfectly reasonable, if that makes sense. Also, I mean... he's a motorcycle stuntman who has grown up traveling with a carnival - talk about a unique hero, at least in my experience.
There was on plot thing that I felt was a little bit unrealistic, which is the unraveling of Evan's family. With hope that this isn't a spoiler, there is an addiction issue and I think, as someone who has seen a close family member unravel into a serious addiction that really, really impacted the entire family, I feel like it wouldn't have happened quite so quickly. I get why it did in the course of the story and I'm certainly not saying that I think it couldn't happen that way, I just feel like a slightly longer time line with a slightly slower move from where her life started in the book to where it ended up would have had more emotional weight and realism for me. Addicts are incredible liars and can often hold things together for a lot longer than people think before everything falls apart. I actually would have found it really interesting if this book had taken place over 2-3 years longer. Obviously this is just me being really subjectively nitpicky in thinking of what the book could have been, but I'm definitely left with that.
The carnival aspect for me was such a great setting and I really appreciated that it didn't get cartoonish and that the characters that we encountered at the carnival didn't feel like caricatures. It could have easily gone to a melodramatic place with crazy things happening constantly, so I'm glad that it had the feeling of a sort of... valley of misfit toys more than just a bunch of wacky characters running around being wacky.
I honestly just really liked this book. Obviously I liked the main characters, but I also really liked the side characters and I liked that they all felt human as well. I liked the chemistry and build of things between Evan and Sebastian and the way that things grew between them at a pace that was both really enjoyable to read and also made sense for both characters. I liked the sort of mysterious darker side plot that ended up being really important at the end, I thought it was well plotted and played out subtly - though the whodunnit of it all did feel a little bit obvious, I don't think it was actually intended to be a twist so much as just a part of the story.
I would really, really like to see Charleigh Rose continue in this world she created of the carnival, obviously there are three more Sons Of Eastlake who could get their own stories and I suspect that I would devour them all!
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