DNF Review: Famous in a Small Town by Emma Mills

Title: Famous in a Small Town
Author: Emma Mills
Genres: Young Adult contemporary
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For Sophie, small-town life has never felt small. She has the Yum Yum Shoppe, with its famous fourteen flavors of ice cream; her beloved marching band, the pride and joy of Acadia High (even if the football team disagrees); and her four best friends, loving and infuriating, wonderfully weird and all she could ever ask for.

Then August moves in next door. A quiet guy with a magnetic smile, August seems determined to keep everyone at arm’s length. Sophie in particular.

Country stars, revenge plots, and a few fake kisses (along with some excellent real ones) await Sophie in this hilarious, heartfelt story.

Thank you to Macmillan for sending me an ARC of this book! 

I don’t tend to DNF books that often, and I certainly don’t tend to write reviews for these books a lot. The reason why I’m making an exception today is because 1) I got this book for review, and even though I’m sending it to another blogger that will hopefully be able to write a full review on it, I’d feel guilty not reviewing it at all, and 2) I feel like I’ve read enough of the book to talk about it for a little while. Just, keep in mind that I haven’t read the full book, so this review can be taken with a grain of salt.

The reason why I don’t tend to DNF books that often is because I’m a curious person, and almost all books either have characters that I like and I’ll want to know what happens to them, or a plot that intrigues me (even if it’s only a little) and I’ll (again) want to know what happens at the end. This book had neither of those things.

Famous in a Small Town very much felt like a slice of life book. We follow a group of teenagers moving through life in their small town, and the overarching plot is mostly about them trying to get this country star which is originally from their small town to come back and help them with their fundraiser. I think the book certainly did this ‘slice-of-life’-aspect well, but it’s just something that doesn’t work for me personally. Like I said in the previous paragraph, I need something that intrigues me to keep reading, and slice of life books often don’t give me that.

I also didn’t really care about the characters in general, because this book did a thing that’s a giant pet peeve for me: they introduced a lot of characters at once. I’m not that great with names, so if you introduce 10+ characters in the first few chapters I’m just not going to remember who they are. And it’s quite hard to care about characters when you keep mixing them up, or just keep forgetting who exactly they were. And, to be totally honest, this started to frustrate me a lot.

Other than this, the book was fine. The writing was pretty good, fast-paced and easy to get into. The setting was cute. I liked the friendships and the budding romance. Maybe I would’ve started to like this book a lot more if I kept reading, but hey, I have way too many books on my TBR to spend hours on a book that I don’t like and that frustrates me, just because it might get better.

So while I didn’t personally like the book, I know that many people are probably going to like it. In fact, looking at Goodreads, it looks like a few people already did! And I, for one, am definitely still going to try out other Emma Mills books. I already have two sitting on my shelves and I’ve heard great things about them, so I’m excited.

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