My inner theatre nerd is dancing after finishing the uplifting and glorious 'The Love Curse of Melody McIntyre'. We follow Melody as she stage manages her high school production of 'Les Misérables' in their theatre space which has a history of turbulent theatrical disasters. As a result, the cast and crew have a list of superstitions, actions such as saying g**d l*ck or uttering the name of the Scottish play bringing a curse upon the production and needing an immediate counter-curse. The new curse for Les Mis? After a string of broken relationships, the crew decides if Melody falls in love, the musical is doomed. Unfortunately for Mel, starlet Odile Rose is back in town for the show and the pair have an immediate sparky connection. Can Mel really avoid falling in love and bringing a curse upon them all?

Reading as someone who was always in the orchestra pit for school shows, viewing the process through the lens of the Stage Manager was a fresh perspective I really appreciated. The intensity of the process comes through in the writing particularly with the inclusion of various documents which share the rigour of the rehearsal schedule. Inexplicably, I found myself caring deeply about broken mic packs, missing props and lost singing voices. Talley develops the characters of the crew and cast to a point where the reader is invested in the success of the musical and everything which threatens this acting as a crushing blow. Additionally, the myriad of musical theatre references throughout were also an injection a stagecraft I needed while the theatres remain closed. (As an aside, where can I buy Odile's 'Young, scrappy and hungry' t-shirt??)

This book is 'You Should See Me in a Crown' for the theatre crowd, delivering cuteness, controversy and theatrical hijinks in equal measure with a beautifully heart-warming relationship between Mel and Odile at its core. I loved it! (and you will too)

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher who provided an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Thank you @hqstories @NetGalley & @robin_talley for the advance digital copy of THE LOVE CURSE OF MELODY MCINTYRE - out on 12th November.

READ THIS IF... you like musical theatre, high school drama, and sapphic YA stories.

THE STORY... Melody McIntyre is stage manager for her high school’s production of Les Misérables. The crew have decided that her romances have been bad luck in previous productions, and she’s agreed that she will not fall in love until after the show has wrapped. That should be easy, right? Wrong.

I WAS... so excited by this book, especially as a long time fan of Robin Talley, and this hit every expectation. I instantly loved Melody - her passion for theatre was infectious, and she cared fiercely for her friends (even if she didn’t always show it!). The dynamic of the cast and crew rivalry was really cleverly done, and I was impressed by the sheer amount of side characters that were distinctive enough that I could tell them all apart. As a theatre fan, I loved all the musical references, from acknowledging the difficulty/near impossibility of the Guns and Ships rap, to questioning why Russel Crowe was cast as Javert! This was humorous and heartwarming, and a perfect break from some of my more spooky reads this month.

NOW... If you’re a fan of LGBT YA, preorder this now! I’d also recommend anything by Robin Talley - but especially this, Pulp, and Lies We Tell Ourselves.

I absolutely adore this book. It makes me want to be 16 again in some sort of alternate universe and be part of an epic love story because we all know that was never going to happen to 16 year old me in this universe.
This book had me hooked from day 1. I love the author's style of writing and the story was simply phenomenal.
I need more LGBTQ+ love stories in my life.

I always have high hopes for Robin Talley books and, whilst this maybe wasn't as grand scale as some of her others, it certainly did not disappoint.
My own high school theatre days are long behind me, but this really captured the atmosphere - the excitement, the friendships, and (of course) the gossip. I had the songs from Les Mis stuck in my head the entire time. I also loved the romance at the heart of the novel, as both girls slowly became more comfortable with themselves.
The Love Curse of Melody McIntyre was a eally fun, engaging read, with a wonderful uplifting ending.

Thank you to NetGalley & Harper Collins for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Melody McIntyre is a Stage Manager for her High School Theatre & believes in every theatre superstition, including those created by her own cast & crew for each new production they put on. After an incident during Romeo & Juliet, it is agreed that Melody's love-life is cursing their shows so during Les Mis she is not allowed to fall in love. Cue Odile Rose, a very talented & successful actress. The story follows Mel as she tries to put on a disaster-free show & not fall for Odile.

I loved everything about this book: Mel & Odile, the high school theatre setting, the Les Mis references, the endless disasters & how everyone pulled together to fix them. I would definitely recommend this book & I will be reading more by this author for sure.

The Love Curse of Melody McIntyre is a YA romcom about high school theatre kids, in which a stage manager with a tendency towards relationship drama during productions falls for one of the major actors. Melody's crew decide that the superstition for the upcoming musical needs to revolve around her dramatic love life, so she is banned from love until the show is over. Then, Odile Rose, a senior who has already starred on Broadway and in TV, auditions for the show, and there's something between the two, but Melody is sure she can keep this under control and stop the production being a disaster.

Having read other of Robin Talley's YA novels which are historically set in particular points of time in the 20th century, this book was a bit of a surprise. It's much more of a light romcom than the others I've read, which tend to tackle some heavier subjects, and probably some people will prefer those and others this one, but for me this book felt a bit lacking. It requires you to know quite a bit about theatre, both the way productions are put on and specific references to shows (the show they do is Les Mis, and as someone who has only read the book, I only understood half of what they said about it), and there were definitely confusing points for me.

Melody was a bit of a conflicting protagonist, confident in her role as stage manager and her bisexuality, but also often shown as a terrible friend who didn't really grow from that. The romance between her and Odile is sweet (and Odile was a fun character suggesting that child/teen acting isn't all sparkles), though Melody really needed to stop referring to her as an 'ingenue' every few pages. It sometimes felt like there were so many characters that you could lose track, but it was good that it had enough characters to really feel like they were putting on what seemed like a fairly large scale show.

This is a YA romcom about two girls falling in love whilst putting on a high school theatre production, so it's clear there's going to be a lot of people who really love it, but for me, it was a bit disappointing in comparison to some of Talley's other books and I felt a bit too outside of the theatre 'club' to understand all of the terminology and references.

Can Robin Talley PLEASE stop making me cry?

Only joking. Never stop. Please.

This story was the heartwarming positive lgbt+ rep I needed in my youth. If I could travel back in time I would, but alas, I can’t- so I’m making up for it now.

The story follows students in highschool who are members of the theatre department, (either tech, or actors) the two battling against the cool vs nerd divide. (As a nerd you can guess who I was routing for)

Mel- the tech stage manager- is known for having dated a large percentage of the theatre crew. Literally, most of them, she was hitting a home run out there. After a failed performance the crew decide she is the curse, causing shows to fail with her relationships, and wrongfully she promises to break the curse by not dating for a year.

However Mel is a sappy bisexual who can’t help but fall, and I gladly held my heart in my mouth for the entire duration of this book.

F/F , F/M and M/M relationships are covered in this book, and the representation is *chefs kiss* magnificent.

If you’re looking for a cute and cozy, heartwarming read this is probably for you.

I marked this down 1 star purely because I loathed some of Mels friends, and whilst I hoped they would suddenly be taken out by a random asteroid caused by the stage curse, sadly they weren’t.

I would like to thank HQ Stories, the publisher who provided me with an arc of this awesome title.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC of this wonderful story! This is my first ARC review as well, and it's a memorable one at that. I've not a huge YA collection but The Love Cure of Melody McIntyre had everything in it that I'd consider to make a successful YA novel: I'm going to take inspiration from Melody's highly organised bullet-points here:

1. An exciting theme of theatre: the school's productions offered a wonderful sense of close-knit scenes that made for an excellent mix of the bubbling chaos of a high-strung cast and crew, in a bustling high school, as well as the unique opportunity to explore the intense characteristics of specific characters, and their relationships as they evolve throughout the story. It was a really true reflection on the high-energy, impulsive and reactionary relationships within the high school setting.

2. But it was also very real in its sense of teaching lessons - combining the striving aspirations (particularly of Melody) with considerations of working within a team. I felt the high-school domain of theatre critiqued the show-business world's cat-like attributes, particularly for the divide of cast and crew. But the final attitudes highlighted that, actually, working together, dispelling blame but uniting for the passions of the collective, is the most powerful force there is. The united sense towards the end of the novel had me cheering for the team!

3. Onto the main action in the show - and the title! Melody, the protagonist as the driven Stage Manager, is depicted as a sixteen year old with an impulsive romance history and I felt I could relate to her sense of selfhood, both in her designated career aspirations, with an organised motivation and passion, and her desires to discover herself and her personal desires. I was surprised to see how many partners Melody had had at the age of 16! But I think what I liked about this spin was her reflection on how genuine/ingenuine these feelings were. As someone who hasn't had those experiences but is a little older than Melody here, it was interesting to see that she admits she is a virgin and that really showed me that her relationships were centred on more than sex - the representation of a bisexual girl in this book was not making a big thing of 'unconventional' relationships (the book doesn't bat an eyelid to the gay teacher or the same-sex parenthood) but questions the meaning of feelings, the desires of adolescence, and ultimately falling in love. I love that this book normalised queer relationships as integral to the story but not significantly a factor of it as a book of 'oh look, this person isn't heterosexual'. I valued that a lot. It did, however, show an idyllic world where high-schoolers wouldn't comment on the fact that Melody had two dads, and the lack of comments on their openly gay teacher were something that (though I hope for a world one day where it is realistic) I couldn't see happening in my own world. But again, I think that the acceptance of these circumstances opened up a greater avenue to draw attention to the meanings behind feelings, not how those feelings look from the outside.

I was gripped by this lighter read. It was a heartwarming happy ending kind of book and it brightened the 2 days it took for me to read it! It was super fluffy, and the rollercoaster effect of the relationships I became very quickly invested in, had me hooked all the way through. It was a drama within a drama, and a pleasure to absorb myself into. Whilst maybe not realistic in the more cynical views and situations a high school full of students, even today, might voice on LGBT+ families, it projected a world that aspires to a community love for expressing yourself - and where better to voice that than the theatre?

I didn’t know what to expect with this book but unfortunately I just couldn’t get into this read at all . I did like the layout how the book is written however and the first half of this book I did enjoy but then it just started to fall off for me where It started to feel like a drag . I do think there will be fans who will love it but just wasn’t for me 2 star