Member Reviews
Really good, addictive read. Easily devoured in one sitting.
Weaving in some mystery and some romance the author does a great job of keeping the reader captivated.
I'm terribly sorry, I had a lot of issues downloading this book and couldn't get it to be visible for review. I'm disappointed as it looks amazing and I've seen some other reviews so I know I'm missing out.
Books about high school friendships and fallouts are common, and yet somehow there is an element to them that eludes most writers: the bad times aren’t constantly bad. See All the Stars by Kit Frick perfectly captures the see-saw-like, constantly changing nature of friendships. Kit Frick did a great job capturing the essence of high school, with characters that seem to jump right off the pages. A compelling storyline combined with beautiful writing make this a must-read.
Before Ret, I was basically invisible.
With Ret, I was somebody.
Lets meet the characters:
Ellory- She is our main character. The artist. The shy, kind and easily influenced one.
Ret- The leader, the it-girl, the girl everyone wants to be. You get it.
Jenny- the wannabe, poser of sorts, snob, suck-up
Bex- The mediator, problem solver, peacemaker.
This novel had so much depth and beauty in every chapter. Now being an adult this novel makes you go back in time and think of the raw beauty of childhood and what mistakes will be made and how it will shape your future. My mind is still in a jumble of what I just read that I'm not sure how to put it into words. My favorite read so far.
This novel is told through Ellory's perspective. We follow her and her best friends through high school years, going from two timelines 'NOW and 'THEN' eventually colliding into the epically tragic finale of finding out what really happens, which is referred to as 'the fall' I had my guess on what was going to happen and of course I was right but the author through in a HUGE mind blowing twist that left me utterly speechless.
Overall I loved this novel more you can imagine. I was hesitant to read this because it is a YA novel but this wont disappoint.
Thanks to NetGalley & everyone!!!
A BIG Thank You to NetGalley, Simon and Schuster Children’s Publishing and Margaret K. McElderry Books for providing me a copy of “See All the Stars” by Kit Frick in exchange for my review.
Before I get into the details, I LOVED reading this book and managed to finish most of it in one sitting.
The story is written in a beautiful way where each chapter shifted between what’s happening NOW vs what’s happening THEN. Even though the setting changed between the chapters, the pacing remained consistent and kept me invested in the story. Throughout the book, the author cleverly integrates topics of friendship, breakups, and betrayals masked with a level of suspense. Furthermore, the ending completely threw me off. I am not going to spoil it, but I did not see that plot twist coming at all! I had to go back and re-read a few passages to see if it all fit, and it did! It’s one of those books that made me sit in awe after finishing, just to grasp it all in. That in itself makes this such a memorable read.
Coming to the characters, the author has written them realistically that the reader can easily relate to. They are complex, have issues, make mistakes and act impulsively; in other words, they behave like teenagers. Moreover, I loved the analogy the author used to connect each character to a planet/star to describe their bond. Ellory is the main character and the person whom I could relate to the most. When she reminisces over her friendship with Ret, it made me recall about my past friendships and how they fell apart. Ret is a character you just love to hate. She oozes confidence and attracts people to be her friends for her own advantage. More than Ret, I think I despised Jenni. Even though she doesn’t appear much, I hated her attitude towards Ellory whenever she appeared.
Kit Frick has done an amazing job in her debut novel and I have instantly become her fan! When I think about it, the story is nothing new and has been done countless times before. However, the way the author has weaved the words and described the story is so captivating that feels fresh. There was never a moment where I got bored and felt like skipping a few pages. Now that I have finished reading “See all the stars”, I am already anxiously looking forward to her next book release. Overall, I loved “See All the Stars” and highly recommend others to give it a chance and read it.
I was very disappointed by this story. I love a good mystery and at the start of the story I was definitely interested in finding out what had happened between Ellory and Ret. Unfortunately this story doesn't bring anything new, the twists were not unique and I saw them coming miles away. There are only so many twists out there in the world I guess so great characters and storytelling would have been able to still make this a compelling read. However, the characters weren't all that interesting, Ellory is extremely boring. I didn't care for her one bit. Ret was such a cliche and their friendship was very toxic. I didn't like any of the characters and I just didn't care for anyone. It took me forever to read this book and I put it down for a while multiple times. The only reason I continued was to see if I was right about the 'twists'. Like I said, this book was quite boring and didn't bring anything new. You might be able to enjoy if you haven't read more stories like this but I think there are way better ones out there.
I mainly got a copy of this through NetGalley due to my interest in the synopsis, mainly the part that said this book was like "We Were Liars".
I was interested from the beginning. There's a timeline split, a "then" and a "now", to show what has happened to Ellory, our main character and her friends. The story is well paced and interesting but the characters were hard for me to care about. There's also a bit of instalove which I don't like.
Overall, the story was entertaining enough but it didn't draw me in much.
I didn't expect this book to be special, but that's what it was. I absolutely loved how it was written, the storyline... but especially the characters. They were very well written and it was like they were going to jump out of the page and continue the story in front of my eyes. I can't wait this book to be released because it was one of my favourite novels of the year.
Book requested via Netgalley. Thank you to the publisher for the opportunity.
The book starts out with four girls Ellory, Ret, Bex and Jenni. The narrator, Ellory, describes her and her friends as parts of the solar system. We find them towards the beginning of their junior year and then we flash forward to senior year where none of the girls are even friends anymore. What tore these girls apart?
The story is pretty typical teenage girl drama and manipulation. Pretty much everything every girl hated about high school. The story really reminded me of the show Pretty Little Liars, especially with the fact that we had to wait forever to find out what tore them all apart. I must admit the end did shock me a bit and it was definitely a decent read.
I was really looking forward to reading this book but I have been unable to download it in the current format. Hopefully I can read it when it is published.
This book was hard for me to rate because while I liked it, I also had trouble connecting to the characters in the book. I ended up with a 4 star rating because I did not see the end coming at all.
This novel alternates between taking place in the past, starting the summer before Ellory's junior year (then), and the present, starting just before Ellory starts her senior year (now). We know that something happened between then and now that left Ellory friendless and single with her only goal to make it through the year, but we don't know what happened, and we slowly learn, in this alternating timeline, the events that led to her current predicament.
I really liked this way of telling the story. I think that if the book had been chronological, I wouldn't have liked it nearly as much, because the mystery of not knowing what happened was kept intact until close to the end of the book. There were a lot of times that I found myself reading solely to find out what happened because what was currently happening wasn't really holding my interest. I was able to predict one of the twist but the other definitely surprised me.
As I mentioned earlier, I had trouble connecting with the characters in this story. The whole story is told from Ellory's POV, and in the 'then' parts, we see her friendship with Ret, Jenni, and Bex, as well as her relationship with Matthias. While I couldn't connect with them, it also felt real to me, and I liked that. It was really interesting to see how the relationships changed as the story progressed, so despite personally not connecting with any of them, I still liked seeing how everything panned out with them.
I would recommend this to people who like YA contemporaries. I think it's well written and engaging and the mystery on what happened is definitely intriguing. As a side note, maybe I just have never seen this, but the fact that their school had 8 stories seemed very unrealistic to me. I don't think I've ever heard of a school with more than 3 levels, but again, that could just be my limited knowledge of high schools around the country.
See all the stars is one of those books that stays with you. Since the first chapter I knew this book was going to be something special to me. I could relate with the main character, I could feel her pain and her struggles with trying to move on. It's a book about friendship, heartbreak, betrayal, and finding yourself on your own way, meaning you decide who you get to be not other people. The book alternates between the past and present day, this way you start to piece together what happened to the main character. At some point it reminded me a lot of Pretty Little Liars, in the sense that something big happened between the group of four friends, something so big that they never talked to each other again. Then, you have the romance aspect, in which something happened between the two lovers that he is no longer part of the MC life. For me this book hit close to home since I had a similar dynamic with some friends in high school, I felt that without them, I was nobody. I had a best friend that I knew I was special to her but the way the relationship developed and she started treating me, it wasn't how a true friendship should be. Eventually we parted our ways and it was hard, but I learned to think and act for myself and If I had stayed with that group, I would not have been able to do that.
This book also had a little suspense to it, since you do not know what happened between the characters, and when we found out, you can say it can be a little surprising. Personally I was not expecting it, but when I found out, a lot of things made sense. I completely suggest this book if you are into a contemporary, "suspense" story. It is completely relatable, you can have 30 years and still feel the struggles and issues the characters were going through in High School.
I received an advanced copy of this book from NetGalley. All thoughts and opinions are my own.
4.5🌟
"It's hard to find the truth beneath the lies you tell yourself." Kit Frick
It was a nice reading with teens and their problems. It's a lot of teen drama from highschool, handling boys, school, friends. I was a little bit confused by the ping-pong between then and now chapters. I think now I would read the entire THEN part and then skip to the NOW, seems logical this way.
I liked Ellory and Mathias. Ret was not my kind of girl, too mean, too self-absorbed. It looked like everything was spining around her.
The end was abrupt but all over everything flowed naturally. It was sad and heart-broking.
Over all it was a reading I enjoyed. I'm looking forward to see the next book from this author.
"Whoever said that time heals all wounds didn't know what he was talking about. Time dulls the wounds, makes them bearable. But it doesn't patch you up and send you on your way, good as new." Kit Frick
This books was much more suspenseful than I expected, and the shift between then and now really dded t the tense atmosphere. I don't want to give away anything, but I did not see that twist in the end coming!
Thank you NetGalley for the ARC.
The book revolves around Ellory and her circle of friends. The books starts off with a party that changes their life forever. How friends become foe. I liked the mystery aspect of the story but found it too slow at times. It will make you keep reading it nonetheless just to find out what happened to the girls to make them fall apart. It could easily be the next Mean girls.
Thanks to Netgalley for providing me a copy for an honest review. This book focuses around an incident that has changed Ellory's life. The problem for me was that it took over 250 pages for the incident to be revealed. This book has good reviews on Goodreads, but it wasn't my cup of tea. Unfortunately, for me, I did not find it fast-paced. It lacked the motivation to keep me reading. After about 175 pages, I realized that I was just reading to finish it. Therefore, I finally just skipped to the end to see what had happened. While I enjoyed the end of the book, it was just too much of a slow- burn for me.
Thanks to NetGalley for providing me a complimentary copy of SEE ALL THE STARS by Kit Frick in exchange for my honest review
I finished this book a couple of days ago and it's still with me. See All the Stars ticks all the boxes for me: Intelligent prose with a lyrical feel, a dual timeline that kept the pace moving and MOVE, it did. Vivid characters I came to know and made a part of my own world for a few days. And did I mention that twist at the end? I did not see it coming and it left me speechless for a few minutes.
Kit Frick has shown us friendship and high school and emotions and regret. She's shown us sociopathy and destruction, illness and love. This book is dark and rich, like fine chocolate. Savor it.
See All the Stars will draw you in and have you hooked from page one.
There is a host of characters but our main character, Ellory is our storyteller.
Her story flips back and forth between her, Junior and Senior year in, High School.
You are aware that an incident has occurred because the close knit group of friends, suddenly becomes torn apart, with Ellory becoming ostracized. Frick captures the mean girl, herd mentality relationships that happen among teen girls and how secrets and lies tear apart the foundation of relationships, regardless of how tightly knit the appear to be.
The story line is well thought out and the characters are well developed. The words leap off the pages and keep you mesmerized. This is a stunning debut, with twists and turns. One of them is very predictable but the other one keeps you in the dark and when it is revealed everything falls into place, wrapping this book up with perfection.
If you love, Pretty Little Liars, you will love, See all the Stars!
I finished this book last night, but I couldn't write a review then, as I was too emotional. I literally finished the book, sat quietly in shock for a minute and then the tears started streaming and just wouldn't stop. When a book can emotionally captivate you like that, you know it's an amazing one. There was no chance I could even contemplate giving this book anything less than five stars. I read this book in three sittings; the last sitting I read over 200 pages. I honestly just couldn't stop. The secret wasn't revealed to the very, very end and I was so confused about what it might be that I knew I couldn't put the book down, go to sleep and start again the next day. This book is compared to 'We Were Liars' which is a book I've read and a really great one at that, but due to this I knew the secret was going to be a shocking one. I kinda have hope for Ellory and Matthias down the line. What he did was bad and I should hate him, but I'm still for some reason really drawn to him. I'm also in two minds about how I feel about Ret. This story is definitely going to stick with me for a long time.