Review: The Love Curse of Melody McIntyre

The Love Curse of Melody McIntyre by Robin Talley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Finished on May 15, 2021

Favorite Scene/Quote: Promposal

4.5/5 rounded down

I’m still, in all honesty, a bit on the fence about how I feel about this book. I liked parts of it, but other parts got annoying.
    
Melody McIntyre is a stage manager for the theater shows and she thrives in it and love it. Her year get shaken up when she’s asked to avoid dating as the “curse” of the year, her best friend leaves her for the stage, and Odile (a rising star) ends up being cast in the play. She grows closer to Odile but eventually things start to go wrong in the show, things that she or anyone else can’t explain.

The premise for this book is probably the thing I’m conflicted on the most. While the idea strikes me as interesting, it irritates me in practice. I think it would have been better if Melody had willingly noticed this and chosen to stop dating rather than it being something that the techs tried to convince her to do. The problem with the tech’s convincing her is that it seems needlessly mean. We are provided with a list of the previous things determined to be “curses” and her curse, with the minor exception of Julio’s, is the only curse that actually impacts someone’s personal life. It’s just mean. Especially because people took it way to seriously. Her relationship is outed by one of the actors and people turn on her. They say they can’t trust her because she didn’t tell them about the relationship even though they also kept trying to talk her out of the relationship. No wonder she didn’t tell anyone.

The characters are nice enough. Melody is determined to put on the perfect show, and this sometimes leads to her being a bit tense and overly serious. She also has a whole thing about trying to keep separate from actors and not liking when one of her friends want to try out. I don’t know enough about theater to know if this is a real thing, but I got annoyed by it. Odile seems so genuinely sweet. She’s a senior who has been in commercials and TV. She’s a bit vulnerable (not positive about that word) and eventually she begins to reveal more and more about herself.

This book is split into, technically, 3 parts. Act 1, intermission, and act 2. Intermission is probably my favorite because it consists of only dialogue. This was, by my guess, used by the author as a way of passing time and having the relationship between the two to develop while also not having to have the book seem dragged out and longer than necessary.

This book, overall, is decent enough. I like the characters most of the time and I genuinely enjoyed watching the relationship develop between the two. My main problem is the “curse” and dating hiatus.