Some books get lucky with their marketing team, and end up with a great tagline. Gretchen Schreiber’s sophomore novel is one of those lucky books. “Will fate choose her love or will love choose her fate?” sets this book up perfectly.
All The Star Align [Buy Bookshop Amazon LibroFM] is a magical realism novel where Piper’s family is gifted with knowing their fated love from the first glance. Piper desperately wants that moment to happen for her so she can feel like she really belongs in her family and take over the family business. She feels like an outsider due to her visible disability and the fact that her parents are getting a divorce, despite “The Blessing” picking them for each other.
Piper is trying to patch things up with her longtime bestie Leo at a party, and that’s when “The Blessing” kicks in… right as Leo is trying to ask her to choose him over her family’s magic. And thus, that great tag line comes into play.
I love the way Gretchen writes her main characters. Piper and Ellie from Ellie Haycock is Totally Normal [Buy Bookshop Amazon LibroFM] are both visibly disabled, as is Gretchen, and that brings an extra set of challenges. It’s so important for people to see experiences on the page that they don’t live through. Fiction helps us develop our sense of empathy, especially when we read all forms of diversity, including disability.
This story is so sweet and complex. Not only is Piper dealing with the love triangle, but she’s wading through her parents’ divorce, relationships with her aunts, and the strain it all puts on her connection with her best friend. Teens in reality are definitely wading through all of those issues, just without the magical bits, so it’s not just fun, it’s valuable.
My only wish is that the resolution of the love triangle feels obvious. I wanted a bit more tension and guessing at who she would pick. In the grand scheme of things, that’s not the worst problem a book could have.
Literary Hypewoman 
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