I tried, I really did. I'll put up with all sorts of ridiculous plot contrivances, but I generally expect published work to be better than fanfiction. The concept was cute enough--girl meets fabulous movie star she is (of course) obsessed with, tries to play it cool, and in the course of acting like, you know, a human being, has a grand romance anyway. However, and this is a pretty big however, I didn't really sign up for Mary Sue self-insertion. I can find masses of that on the internet (or read other recently published, best-selling travesties) to fill that niche. I would have bought into the story more if there had been at its base an actual conflict. I would have been thrilled to see development of the characters and the story beyond what was telegraphed by the blurb on the back and the first chapter. Unfortunately, this was just the sort of thing that gives the romance genre as a whole a bad name. ( )

This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.

Also, it contains spoilers.

At first, I thought this was going to be a cute little chick lit story. In an ideal world Matti, the main character, was going to discover that Antonio, the man she lusted after on the screen, was a great guy but she really was going to fall for his bodyguard. Instead, the bodyguard ends up being boring and unpleasant. Antonio ends up too good to be true, accepting the discovery that she really had been an obsessed fan and forgiving her the next day. Ultimately, there is no lesson learned, and thus no point. Nothing happens during the course of the story, and the cuteness of the main characters actually acts as a detriment to this being an interesting story. ( )

Okay, granted, I requested a book that sounds like a silly young adult romance, but I’ll admit it: I absolutely adored Meg Cabot’s Teen Idol. I was hoping for a fluffy bit of ridiculous fun. I mean, even the cover looks appropriate for a twee little novel.

Matti, an artist, is house-sitting for a friend of hers in an exclusive Santa Fe community. Both she and her extremely flaming BFF (so Hollywood-stereotypical that it made me want to barf- I don’t know a single gay man who actually acts like that in real life) are obsessed with an up-and-coming actor named Antonio Reed.

When I say obsessed, I mean that she has cardboard stand-ups, posters, all two of his movies that she’s watched more than twenty times, and uses his image as a reference in countless drawings. She’s filled notebooks and canvases with his picture. She gets flustered and self-conscious thinking about him. She’s so goofy over this heartthrob that I honestly thought this girl was 17 and doing a family friend a favor, but noooo. She’s in her late twenties. My age.

…and then it turns out that Antonio is there. In Santa Fe. Staying in the same community. Matti sees him walking around, and has the presence of mind- despite her twitterpated response- to warn Antonio about an incoming horde of teenage girls. When she runs into him again at the only restaurant this place apparently has where movie stars are willing to eat, he asks her out, charmed by her lack of crazy-fan-antics.

In the meantime, Matti is constantly freaking out over how to not have frantic fan freakouts, because she (rightly) thinks that he doesn’t want to be romantically involved with someone who is only interested in the characters he played and his extremely attractive face.

And that, folks, is the entire conflict of the book. She tries to hide it, his bodyguard tries to convince him that she’s one of the nutcases, she gradually becomes less of a crazy fan, they fall in love and WHOA HOLY COW SURPRISE EXPLICIT SEX SCENE.

Turns out, not a young adult novel. This is an actual romance novel, fulfilling the expectations of the genre.

And then the book just… ends. He finds out she’s a crazy fan, decides he doesn’t care, and they live happily ever after. Within the last 5% of the book. Least interesting climax of all time.

However, as I read, I began to put pieces together. The end clinched it.

I was reading fanfiction. One of the fanfics written by a girl obsessed with an actor to the point that she writes fiction about the life of a real human being to give greater life to her fantasies about a hot guy. A piece of fiction meant to give the obsessed girl hope that the hot actor will fall in love with her despite the creepy things she’s written about him.

And the guy in question? Orlando Bloom. The character’s name is “Antonio Reed.” They are both English, the physical description matches, and their first big movie role was that of the hot, young, supporting character in an ensemble cast (Legolas in Lord of the Rings vs Will Scarlet in Robin Hood). That single role thrust the previously unknown young actor into a whirlwind of interviews and paparazzi. The more I read, the more obvious it became. The whole thing reads like the author’s fantasy about herself and Orlando Bloom. It was honestly a little sad by the time I finished.

If you can read it as just a light fantasy romance novel, it’s not terrible. It’s definitely not good, as the poor pacing clearly shows, but it could be worse. But if you’re a person who keeps accidentally finding the trainwrecks of fanfiction about celebrities… eesh.

I received this book for free through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. ( )

This was a very light read and fairly predictable, definitely a "beach read." The characters were likeable but not as well developed as I had hoped. The ending was a little contrived since the "problem" in the story was very abrupt. ( )

I have not received this book so that I could review it. I was supposed to receive it as a part of Library Thing's Early Reviewers group.