Thursday, September 12, 2019

Review of In Over Her Head: Lights, Camera, Anxiety by Krysten Lindsay Hager


Welcome to the In Over Her Head: Lights, Camera, Anxiety (The Cecily Taylor Series #2) blog tour! If you follow the blog at all, you may recognize this from my review of the first book. Here are all of my thoughts of the second installment, as well as an excerpt for you to check out. And good luck in the giveaway!


In Over Head Head: Lights, Camera, Anxiety (The Cecily Taylor Series #2)

by Krysten Lindsay Hager
Genre: YA Contemporary Fiction
Release Date: September 3rd 2019
Clean Reads Publishing

Summary:


Cecily feels like she has it all: great best friends, the beginnings of a career as a model/actress, and she’s dating her favorite singer, Andrew Holiday. Then Cecily’s best friend Lila begins to ditch her every time Lila’s boyfriend calls. Cecily feels lost, but she and Andrew begin connecting more and she’s never been in a relationship where she felt so understood. Andrew even begins to confide in her about his anxiety. Soon Cecily experiences her own anxiety on a magazine photo shoot, but she manages to impress the magazine staff. Just when it seems like all her dreams are coming true, everything comes crashing down when a photo of Andrew with another girl appears online. He swears nothing happened, but Cecily is crushed. She feels like she’s lost two of the people closest to her. Was her perfect relationship real or was she in over her head? 




**My thoughts**
I was so happy to see that the sequel to the first book was finally out! I have been looking forward to finding out how things were working out between Cecily and Andrew. I cannot imagine how difficult it would be to sustain a relationship with a pop star who has to be on the road so much and has all kinds of other obligations that would keep him away. And I'm a grown adult. These are teenagers! And to complicate things further, both of them have already been badly burned by jerks in their pasts, making both of them wary of trusting anyone new. It's sad that they already are at this point at the age of 17, but there we go.

I felt like this one dealt a lot more with some of the realistic teenage issues with friends in high school and the constant pull to be popular and follow the crowd, as well as all of those issues with girl friends and their boyfriends and how friendship dynamics can change. And then the whole trust bit within cliques. I do not miss these days!

And then there is the almost fantasy aspect of the story. Cecily is dating her longtime pop singer crush. She is starting to deal with the pressures of being with a celebrity, even though they are trying to keep their relationship on the down-low to avoid the tabloid drama. And of course she wants to get herself going on her own career. How do you know whom to trust? 

It's definitely a roller coaster of emotions and I felt like there were a lot of typical teenager reactions to various situations. I wasn't sure which direction the story was going to take and felt like a couple of different endings would have worked out. It definitely kept me engrossed on a lazy evening and I wouldn't mind hearing more about what happens to the characters in the future! I think some of the other ones have their own stories waiting to be told as well.

I received a complimentary copy in exchange for my honest review.


Book One:

Can Dreams Come True? (The Cecily Taylor Series #1)


Summary:

Cecily has always had a huge crush on singer Andrew Holiday and she wants to be an actress, so she tags along when her friend auditions for his new video. However, the director isn’t looking for an actress, but rather the girl next door—and so is Andrew. Cecily gets a part in the video and all of Andrew’s attention on the set. Her friend begins to see red and Cecily’s boyfriend is seeing green—as in major jealousy. A misunderstanding leaves Cecily and her boyfriend on the outs and Andrew hopes to pick up the pieces as he’s looking for someone more stable in his life than the models he’s dated. Soon Cecily begins to realize Andrew understands her more than her small-town boyfriend—but can her perfect love match really be her favorite rock star?



  

Purchase:
Book Depository: https://bit.ly/2ZuKQun
Book One: https://amzn.to/35zVbsF
(affiliate links included)



Excerpt:
One day I had the career and the guy of my dreams. Then Danielle King came along. If people could be trusted, maybe it would have been okay, but they can’t. They suck. And now my dream relationship was gone and no one would ever know what had actually been in my grasp.
How can a person go from having a whole life with someone, and then it ends like you were never even together? No wonder people talk about how awful divorces are. That must hurt a million times more. Sure, I don’t have to see Andrew every day at school like I did Zach, but it seems like Andrew was everywhere. I went to the grocery store with my mom and they were playing one of his songs because he’s technically a local.
 Andrew’s music was always what I listened to when I was sad. His heartache music got me through the worst times and now, not only could I not stand to listen to it, there was now the chance I could end up hearing music about our breakup. Actually, I didn’t know which was worse: the possibility he’d use our relationship as inspiration for a song, or finding out I was barely a blip on his radar and not even warranting a mention. 
What was I supposed to do now?



About the Author
Krysten Lindsay Hager writes about friendship, self-esteem, fitting in, frenemies, crushes, fame, first loves, and values. She is the author of True Colors, Best Friends...Forever?, Next Door to a Star,  Landry in Like, Competing with the Star, Dating the It Guy, and Can Dreams Come True. True Colors, won the Readers Favorite award for best preteen book and the Dayton Book Expo Bestseller Award for children/teens. Best Friends…Forever won the Readers’ Favorite Silver Medal. Competing with the Star is a Readers' Favorite Book Award Finalist. Landry in Like is a Literary Classics Gold Medal recipient.
Krysten's work has been featured in USA Today, The Flint Journal, the Grand Haven Tribune, the Beavercreek Current, the Bellbrook Times, Springfield News-Sun, Grand Blanc View, Dayton Daily News and on Living Dayton. 

Author links:


GIVEAWAY:

1 comment:

  1. Thank you so much for reading and reviewing the book! Loved reading your thoughts on it.

    ReplyDelete