Book Review: Fame, Fate, and The First Kiss by Kasie West

It’s now officially fall! Fall means many things for many people, but on many of the book social media sites I used to follow, it means they will post content relating to books in the horror genre. (Probably because they want to talk, and even promote, books that are good for the Halloween season of fall.)

I, on the other hand, never really liked horror movies, books, or anything relating to it. Gothic novels? Yes, I’ll read those. Suspense novels? Sure! Thrillers? I’ll read them. But horror? Nope. No way. And the same thing goes for anything macabre and contains a lot of gore. It doesn’t matter if the books are in the horror genre. I won’t read them.

This is why I tend to favor books that tell stores with horror elements in them in a different way. Or it isn’t the most important part of the story. This is the case for the young adult romance Fame, Fate, and The First Kiss by Kasie West.

The blurb on the back of the book is…

Lacey Barnes has dreamed of being an actress for as long as she can remember. So when she gets the opportunity to star in a movie alongside one of Hollywood’s hottest actors, she doesn’t hesitate to accept the part.

But Lacey quickly learns that life in the spotlight isn’t as picture perfect as she imagined. She’s having trouble bonding with her costars, her father has hired the definition of a choir boy, Donavan Lake, to tutor her, and somewhere along the way she’s lost her acting mojo. And just when it seems like things couldn’t get any worse, it looks like someone on set is deliberately trying to sabotage her.

As Lacey’s world spins out of control, it feels like the only person she can count on—whether it’s helping her try to unravel the mystery of who is out to get her or snap her out of her acting funk—is Donavan. But what she doesn’t count on is this straight-laced boy becoming another distraction.

With her entire future riding on this movie, Lacey knows she can’t afford to get sidetracked by a crush. But for the first time in her life Lacey wonders if it’s true that the best stories really do happen when you go off script.

As you can see by the blurb, it has nothing to do with horror novels. The book is clearly a romance novel (And a clean romance novel at that) about a teen for teens, but the movie Lacey is filming does. The backdrop of the book mostly takes place at the film set, where Lacey is filming a movie based off a zombie novel. Because of this, I don’t mind the horror type elements in the book.

As for the actual book, this is one of my favorite books Kasie West wrote. I love the pacing of it as well as the mystery of if someone is sabotaging her on set. The way the book is written is really well done and I enjoyed reading it. When I read it the first time, I wanted to keep reading it until it was over. Even though it has been years since I read the book for the first time, I still enjoy the story a lot.

You can probably guess I like this book a lot and recommend it. Even though a romance story about an actor (Or actress in this case) and a non industry member isn’t new, I enjoy and prefer this novel to others available today.

That’s all for now! Thank you for reading!