The Love Curse of Melody McIntyre

Review of the Love Curse of Melody McIntyre
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Just because you have a neat idea for verisimilitude doesn't mean you need to beat the reader over the head with it.

I enjoy performance. Really, I do. I love theater, specifically musical theater, and I've even been known to jump on stage myself a time or two. So I get that committing to your role is an important part of crafting the experience for the viewer/reader, and the suspension of disbelief.

On the flipside, I also know that committing to use a Scottish accent for M*cbeth despite the fact that you sound like a Southerner gargling several fidget spinners is more about the actor feeling good about themselves, rather than putting the performance (and the audience) first.

Love Curse is a traditional story broken up in modern epistolary format by Google Drive entries. It's a neat idea that gets wayyy too overused. Seriously, in 2004 they just created the concept of Gmail, no way the class of 2007 was using a school-issued GDrive account to copy and paste the contents of newspaper articles from 1906. Just not happening. Plus the headers (example at the top of this hilarious review) got annoying and introduced far more names than were necessary.

Looking past all that though, Melody is a disaster bi of the highest order, which makes for an entertaining story. After being ostentatiously dumped in the theater control room during the trickiest part of a live performance, the rest of the crew decides that Melody's felicitations will have to be kept under wraps. So of course she meets the Girl of Her Dreams straight (not-so-straight?) away.

There's plenty of YA angst to be found throughout the book, including some nice friend rifts over cliques and stereotypes. There are a weirdly large number of LGBT adults around, but honestly, who's complaining? Love Curse is an thoroughly enjoyable nostalgic paean to high school drama and high school Drama. Theater kids, rejoice and revel.