this would be a good read for a middle school to a high school student to read. this is book number from goodreads.com and is a first read book for me,
was a very good book ( )

this would be a good read for a middle school to a high school student to read. this is book number from goodreads.com and is a first read book for me,
was a very good book ( )

Review courtesy of Dark Faerie Tales

Quick & Dirty: For the love of Art.

Opening Sentence: A peach falls out of a Cezanne.

The Review:

My thought process throughout this entire book was: ‘How many pages are left?’ Without being unreasonably harsh, I’ll try to outline the few good parts of the story. I learned more about art, Paris, the nine muses and museum security!

Now, onto the not so great parts… My main issue with Starry Nights was that it was too unrealistic and way over the top. Paintings that come to life, I can deal with. Falling head over heels in love with a girl from a painting and then travelling into and through paintings felt too much like Harry Potter for my liking! I appreciate this is YA, but seriously? Weirder still was the ease with which Julien’s friends follow his lead without question. I’m sure if I told my friends that paintings were coming to life and that I could travel into a painting, they would have some serious concerns over my mental state!

“It is truly never a dull moment with you, Garnier.”
I stop walking. “You don’t believe me?”
“Does it matter if I believe you? I’m your friend and I’m going to do whatever you need me to do. I’m all in, whether I believe in ghosts or not.”

The love story between Julien and the girl from the painting might have been more believable if it wasn’t so rushed. It’s love at first sight, followed by a whirlwind romance. That’s hard enough to come to terms with when both people are real but when one is a girl trapped in a painting, it borders on weird / unbelievable.

Every part of me aches for her. For the bitterness, for the pain. For having everything you love, everything you believe, turned against you.
“I’m so sorry that happened to you, Clio,” I say, but how do you even begin to comfort someone who’s been caged for so long, even if the bars are beautiful?

There was also something about Clio that I did not like right from the start. First, I thought she was somehow manipulating Julien and hiding a deep secret, which is why she was trapped in the painting. Only towards the end did I realise that she wasn’t a hidden villain but I still struggled to like her! There’s a point where Clio accuses Julien for implying that she was desperate since he’s the first person able to interact with her for over a century. I must say, I quite agreed!

To conclude, I wasn’t a fan of this book, purely because the story was too unrealistic for my taste.

Notable Scene:

If I were seeing genies riding on magic carpets while huffing on hookahs I’d be less shocked. Instead, all my senses are ignited, and my brain is buzzing, and it feels like I’m dreaming, but I know I’m wide awake and seeing art come alive. This girl has danced her way right out of a Degas.

FTC Advisory: Bloomsbury USA Childrens provided me with a copy of Starry Nights. No goody bags, sponsorships, “material connections,” or bribes were exchanged for my review. ( )

You can read this review and many others at Confessions of a Book Addict

(I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley and Bloomsbury USA Childrens publishing in exchange for an honest review)

Starry Nights by Daisy Whitney had such promise. Set in Paris, France it's a story of a romantic teenage boy who falls in love with a girl trapped in a painting. Pitched as “Night at the Museum meets The Da Vinci Code, with a feminist twist.” I should have loved it. It has everything that I like in a book, but it still fell a bit flat. I just couldn't connect with Julien or Clio at all. The premise for a romantic story is there but it lacked the emotional element to really bring it to life for me.

There are some unanswered questions at the end. What happened to the father and daughter forgery team? Why does Julien's mother place so much stake in what he sees in the art and its condition? Does she know he's different? That part seemed a bit surreal to me. He's a tour guide, granted he loves the art more than anything before Clio comes along, but he's still just a teenager. Her easy acceptance in regards to his ability to heal the art by his presence alone just left me stumped.

It's definitely a cute read though and I'm sure many people will enjoy it. I just like to immerse myself in a story and its characters. I find it frustrating when I can't connect with them. The most interesting parts of the book for me where the ones involving Bonheur and his sister Sophia. The humor and sense of adventure these two supporting characters brought to the story are the only reason I kept reading until the end.
I would recommend this book to anyone that enjoys a cute love story and young adult fiction. ( )

At first, I totally thought this was going to be one of those times where I really like a book that most of my friends did not. The early reviews were discouraging, but it was a 4 star book for the first 75 pages or so. From there, things slid downhill. My hopes were high for Starry Nights, but, sadly, a highly original, creative, beautiful concept turns into a cheesy pile of instalove. Be warned that this review does contain some spoilers.

The opening of this novel is so strong. Whitney's a talented writer, and the concept is gorgeous. At the outset, we have Julien, an artist of limited talent, whose mother runs a Parisian art gallery. He does tours and generally loves art of all forms, music, paintings, sculpture, dance, etc. At night, Julien wanders the halls and sees the art come alive. The subjects pop out of their frames, Degas' dancers performing ballets that only he can see.

The imagery of this, the idea that the paintings have lives of their own within the museum after dark, is stunning. While, yes, there are all sorts of reasons this is unlikely, it's beautiful magical realism, and done very well. At least, until it ceases being magical realism and turns into a paranormal/mythological plot.

While I wasn't a fan of this plot twist where the story went for the mythological rather than the subtle beauty of magical realism, which is one of my favorite things right now, I still admire the originality of the world building that Whitney devises. She's built a novel around the Muses, which I've not personally seen done before. On top of that, she brings in a look at the evolution of art, the way it went from being something done solely by educated men to something that can be created and appreciated by anyone. These are powerful themes, and I still think she handles her concept well. Though not quite what I wanted, her Muse mythology is fascinating and meaningful.

Where Starry Nights flops is the romance. It's a classic case of instalove, complete with the relatively flat characters so typical of this romantic "arc". Even before that, though, I have issues with the romance. She's a girl in a painting and he's a person, so their options are pretty limited, and, though I do sometimes go for weird ships, they didn't have enough of a connection for me to root for them in the face of odds where she's not even a real person. Sure, she likes to eat and he brings her food. They both like art. Wow, do they both like Breakfast at Tiffany's too? There wasn't any real verve or banter in their conversations which are largely boring, and I personally thought he and Emilie, who's in a total of three scenes, had a lot more chemistry.

Julien and Clio, the girl in the painting, fall in love pretty much immediately. In a rather classic Romeo & Juliet scenario, Julien is just out of a bad breakup. Clio, on the other hand, has been in a painting for over a hundred years in a private home, meaning that she hasn't seen ANYONE BUT HIM. He is literally the only boy she's seen in hundreds of years. Instalove is bad enough when there are options, but, when it's "I love you because you're the only person I've literally ever been capable of loving," to me that's not romance but desperation. Part of love is choosing that person over other people, not being cornered into it by circumstance.

Then, there's the ending, which is completely cheesy and convenient. The book could have at least ended in the expected heartbreaking place, but, oh no, this is paranormal romance world and there just HAS to be an HEA, even if it makes no sense. Let's nurture the concept that manicpixiedreamgirls will literally step out of our pop culture to love us. Yeah, that's healthy. Well, good luck to you, Clio and Julien. Two people with no marketable skills who got together when one was on the rebound and one had never spoken to another boy. I'm sure this will end well.

All told, I do think there is a good framework to Starry Nights, but the instalove killed it. I'm left feeling not angry, but disappointed. This could have been a thoughtful, slow-paced, magical novel, but instead went the way of paranormal romance tropes. ( )