Book Review: Heartfall by J.B. McGee

Claire Ross has never been good enough. Not for the girls in the elite group of dancers in her class and certainly not for the approval of her ballet teacher, Mr. Robins. She definitely doesn’t like what she sees in the mirror. Simply put, she doesn’t love herself, so how could she possibly love someone else?

After twelve years of friendship, Sebastian Reyes’ adoring gaze holds more. They soon find themselves unable to control their feelings for one another.

When tragedy strikes, Claire finds herself in a very unlikely and unfavorable position. Regardless of the weight of the emotion, she must make difficult decisions that impact the rest of her life.

Will Claire see that her true love has been right in front of her? Happily ever after isn’t just for fairy tales. To get hers, all she has to do is trust, open her heart and fall.

 

This is the first book that I've read about ballet and even though I had no idea what anything associated with ballet was before I cracked this one open, it was pretty good! This is also the first book that I've read by J.B. McGee.

From the very first page, this book reminded me of Center Stage. It's really nothing like that movie and Heartfall  probably reminded me of it because it's the only other thing I've ever read or watched that was about ballet and the life of someone who participates in it. Not knowing anything about ballet most certainly didn't detract from the enjoyment I got while reading. 

I enjoyed the characters and I was a little surprised by the depth of the characters since the beginning of the book is YA. That's not to say that there aren't deep characters in YA novels, so don't start attacking my review, there was just more to Claire and Sebastian than I had anticipated. That's a great thing, it drew me into the lives of each of them much more quickly than it would have if they had been written differently. The strength behind Claire was a beautiful thing to experience while it was developing. I loved her from the beginning. 

You think you know what you're getting yourself into when you read the back of this book. But it's more. It is so much more than just the blurb. It was beautiful and heartbreaking and basically, a captivating read. The plot does jump around quite a bit. There were parts of the book where I would have been more than fine with hearing more about but it was just glossed over. That was a little upsetting because I just wanted to know more about the characters and what they were going through. Don't get me wrong, McGee left nothing out of the plot that was necessary information, she covered everything I just wanted more ... I didn't want the jumps in time to happen because I'm greedy. 

Excluding the scenes that I wanted just a tad more out of, this was a great book. It was sad. So sad but a good read. Until the epilogue. It came out of NOWHERE. It made sense and closed out the book correctly but talk about left field. I enjoyed how the epilogue really buttoned up everything nice and pretty but it almost felt like an after-thought because it was a little bit random at first. Great book, I'll try another by this author in the future probably. 

* I received this novel in exchange for an honest review *

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