Reviewed by Carissa
TITLE: Dance
SERIES: West End #1
AUTHOR: Teodora Kostova
PUBLISHER: self-published
LENGTH: 291 pages
BLURB:
Jared Hartley is happy. He has a starring role in a popular West End musical, great friends, adoring fans and his own flat in Central London. A relationship is not something he has ever really wanted. Making big plans for the future is not in his nature – Jared is content with his single status and enjoying all the benefits of that lifestyle. He doesn’t even realise something is missing in his life.
Until he meets Fenix.
Fenix Bergman has a dream – to perform on Broadway. When he gets offered the lead role in Poison – a new musical based in London, he accepts, immediately recognising the huge potential of the show. Fenix thinks he has his life completely figured out – he will move to London, help Poison become the new West End hit and bide his time until Broadway comes knocking on his door. He has never wished for anything else but proving to himself and the world that he is a performer worthy of the biggest theatre stage.
Until he meets Jared.
Jared and Fenix’s lives collide and they fill each other’s missing pieces. Neither of them expects to feel so much, so fast for the other. Neither of them expects to need someone so badly when love hasn’t even been in their plans. But when Fenix’s star becomes too bright for London, will the dream he’s chased all his life ruin the dream he’s holding in his hands?
Will he survive getting everything he’s ever wanted?
Will Jared?
REVIEW:
Once upon a time, in a land far far away…
Fenix Bergman was sure that the musical Poison was just the beginning of his rise to fame. And when it got a contract with the Queen Victoria he knew that his trip across the Atlantic was worth the separation from the Broadway stage. Little does he know that the Queen Vic has more than just stage and fame waiting for him, because sharing a dressing room with the famous Jared Hartley sparks something deep and instant in both men. Some might think love at first sight is a fool’s dream, but Jared and Fenix know it is real; because from the moment they meet it is love and nothing else. Love and everything else.
But Fenix still dreams of Broadway, and Jared still feels the loss of his family. And both have interfering and temperamental friends pulling them in separate directions. If the pair expect to have a Happily Ever After they might just need a little of that stage magic they’re so famous for.
I’ve had a bit of a bad run of luck when it has come to books with stage-actors, lately. Or maybe it has been the pool of unknown authors that I’ve been trying to explore. Either way, I was pretty much going into this book with my fingers crossed and hoping that I didn’t get stuck with yet another dud.
And for the most part…I think I lucked out here.
I absolutely loved the first half of this story. It was lighthearted. It was fun. It was cute. It was sexy. It was just what I was hoping for, really. And even though I am pretty skeptical when it comes to books with insta-love, I didn’t mind it at all. At least in the beginning.
For the first half it was great…and then it just kinda spiraled out of control for a bit.
See my whole issue with insta-love is the way it is presented in some books: the full-on, all the time, instant and perfect happiness, love, and understanding at every moment of every day. That is not how love works. I can buy that you see someone and you just know that they are the one. I have no problem with that. I like that. But then to take that knowing and make it into some romance cliché of perfectness…that is just too much for me. Jared and Fenix are just too damn perfect. They have the perfect life, with the perfect partner, they work at the perfect job–and do that job perfectly. I fully expect that when they walk into a room people find themselves fainting because their perfectness must radiate off them like perfect waves of bright white light.
Which made it very odd that in the course of an hour all of it came crashing down. Were they not the perfect couple? Did they not know that their perfect love could conquer all? If they were so damn perfect why did they not bother to even talk about what to do about Fenix’s offer, instead of throwing ultimatums at each other’s heads, then stomping around like 13 year olds? Could it be that all their perfectness does not in fact make a perfect relationship?
I just had a hard time buying their relationship at this point. Fine, they are in love…but the way they are presented and the way they act are two different pictures. Which would have been fine–it shows the flaws and the differences between what we want to believe vs. what is real. But then to turn around and throw them back together, with nary a consequence or dent in those oh-so-perfect feelings…that was too much for me.
It didn’t feel real. It felt like I was reading a fairytale. It was a perfect love, lived in a perfect life. Even their breakup was perfectly miserable–followed by a perfect reconciliation and walk into the perfect sunset. Just too much damn perfect.
And it was not a hard read. It had really good characters, and a really good story. I loved the acting portions of the book, and would love to actually see these productions. It was fun, and flirty, and there are some definite benefits to being that fit and that bendy…but by the end it was just too over the top. Even the sad bit seemed perfectly predictable. And that made what could have been a great book nothing but perfectly average.
RATING: 
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