2 out of 4 stars
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This romance novel revolves around Carter and Daren, who are childhood friends and have been going to the same school in Midtown. Carter's mother, Linda Topps, and Daren's mother, Terra Nova, grew up together and their two families ended up becoming close friends.
When his mother died, Daren lived with his father for a while, but he got kicked out to live with his uncle when his father discovered he was gay. His uncle, then moved to California and the Topps adopted him. Carter had been hitting on Daren on several occasions, and Daren's move to their house made it easier for their relationship to thrive. Much to his delight, Carter learned that his parents didn't seem to have a problem with his relationship with Daren.
Carter is the captain of their school football team, and he doesn't like Daren being in the musicals as he thinks it's crap and lame. As a result, Daren decides to keep secrets from Carter to avoid offending him. Thus, Carter doesn't know that Daren is the student musical director, and also doesn't know Daren has won several awards before as a movie cast, just to mention a few. Forbidden Someday by M. Acen takes the reader by storm as the romance unfolds, and Carter gets to know Daren's secrets one by one.
Every paragraph in this book is knit together in a simple language that appeals to all readers, although the readers will come across some slang terms along the way. The paragraphs alternate from Daren Topps to Carter Topps with tales that seek to gratify the reader's appetite. I liked how the romance is mixed with other themes like sports and art. The sports and art includes football, musicals, baseball, and basketball. Since Daren ended up being famous, I kept waiting to see whether he would switch preferences and choose a girl from school, but unfortunately, I wasn't lucky.
Any book with super character development is a pet for every avid reader. The characters in this novel are so charming that the reader feels lonely when they leave, proving that the author has a good score on character development. My favourite character was Jenny who made Carter so jealous that he nearly jumped on stage when she was dancing with Daren. She even went ahead to ask Daren for a date, since her boyfriend was busy studying for exams. I loved her intelligence.
Appealing as it is, this book didn't go without flaws. It had so many misplaced and missing commas, spelling errors and wrongly used words in almost every paragraph. It was tedious reading through with words like "yours" written as "your's," and "year's" written as "years." There were also words written without a hyphen like in "after school activity," and "last minute freedom." "After school" in this case should have been "after-school," and "last minute" should have been "last-minute." In one of the paragraphs dated Wednesday, November 10. 4:28 p.m., it showed that Daren Topps should be the one speaking but, in the text, Carter Topps is the one speaking. This book deserved a better rating, but the errors let it down. So, I rate it 2 out of 4 stars.
Though the storyline is intriguing with the superb character development, I felt the characters had extensive backstories that somewhat took the beauty of the tale away. Since the author wants to make this book a series, I suggest less of the backstories and some editing, to make the book more appealing.
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Forbidden Someday
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