Starry Nights by Daisy Whitney | A book Review by IrisjeXx

This review was originally posted on my blog IrisjeXx.  I would love for you to check out my blog and tell me what you think about it! Click on this link to go to the original post.

This book was given to me by Rachel from Hello-Chelly!

 

Starry Nights by Daisy Whitney
Published by Bloomsbury USA Childrens on September 3rd 2013
Pages: 288 Goodreads

Seventeen-year-old Julien is a romantic—he loves spending his free time at the museum poring over the great works of the Impressionists. But one night, a peach falls out of a Cezanne, Degas ballerinas dance across the floor, and Julien is not hallucinating.

The art is reacting to a curse that trapped a beautiful girl, Clio, in a painting forever. Julien has a chance to free Clio and he can't help but fall in love with her. But love is a curse in its own right. And soon paintings begin to bleed and disappear. Together Julien and Clio must save the world's greatest art . . . at the expense of the greatest love they've ever known.

Like a master painter herself, Daisy Whitney brings inordinate talent and ingenuity to this romantic, suspenseful, and sophisticated new novel. A beautifully decorated package makes it a must-own in print.

My Thoughts

 This was my first time reading a book that had Art as a main theme. So I can’t really say whether this book is really original in its kind or whether the premises of this book have been used before. What I can say is that when I read the synopsis I became interested right away.

I’ve always had art classes in school, so I think it is fair to say that yes I do love art. Now, I wont turn my blog in to one big discussion with myself on which art I like and which art I don’t, because if I do this post won’t ever be finished since of course all of that is totally up to the taste of one individual person. I do think that Daisy Whitney has made art more approachable for lots of people  with the way she describes them coming alive in the museum after dark is beautiful! The description of the sick paintings is very well done as well, the imagery is great! It is because of these vivid descriptions that made it so easy to fall in love with the paintings.

The mythological aspect of this story, the muses, wasn’t what I was expecting at all! I didn’t dislike it though, eventually it kinda fit the story.

The characters were enjoyable, though I did like some of the minor characters -such as Bonheur- way more than the main characters. There wasn’t anything wrong with the main characters but I just appreciated how Bonheur was the odd one out, his personality was really colourful and his odd behaviour made me laugh.

This story take place in Paris, the city of love! Though from reading the story alone it could be just as easy in another city. I only know that it takes place in Paris because of the Eiffel tower  being displayed on the cover. It was one of the things that I really missed while reading. Since I live in the Netherlands I’ve been to Paris myself and I would have liked for the city and views to be described some more. It just didn’t feel French to me in any way, and it definitely didn’t feel like Paris to me, while it is such a beautiful and vivid city!

The romantic aspect was were it turned bad for me. Julien and Clio fell in love a bit to quickly for my liking, quite a typical case of insta-love. It was very disappointing since the actual story about the paintings coming to life was great! Clio came out of the painting, they went on a date immediately when they don’t even know each other and fall in love. Just like that.

This insta-love is probably why I liked the main characters less as well. The insta-love had this effect that Julien and Clio had limited personality… This also resulted in me not really feeling the connection they were supposed to share. Julien just got out of this ‘bad’ breakup, and Clio had literally been stuck inside a painting for over a hundred year. So they were ‘meant’ to fall in love. It was like Clio just fell in love with the first boy she saw after coming out of that painting she had been trapped in. It just seemed forced and unreal to me.

Aside from all of this, the ending was completely cheesy. Which normally I don’t really mind if it fits the story! But the ending was just a little bit too convenient for my liking.

Overall this book was a bit of a disappointment. The idea and the framework was there, but the insta-love pretty much ruined it for me. I expected it to be a read that would be completely magical -You know the whole paintings coming to life in the night- but it turned out to be less. Not a horrible read, not at all! But nonetheless the expectations I had in advance were severely crushed in some aspects.