#BlogTour The Love Curse of Melody Mcintyre by Robin Talley

Today it's a pleasure to take part in the BlogTour The Love Curse of Melody Mcintyre by Robin Talley.

About the Author

Robin Talley (she/her) is a queer author who grew up in southwest Virginia and now lives in Washington, D.C., with her wife and their kids. She did digital communications work for LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, educational equity, and other progressive causes for fifteen years before she turned to writing full-time, and is now the New York Times-bestselling author of six novels for teen readers: Music From Another World, Pulp, Our Own Private Universe, As I Descended, What We Left Behind, and Lies We Tell Ourselves.

Her books have won accolades including the Amnesty CILIP Honour and the Concorde Book Award, have been short-listed for the Lambda Literary Award and the CILIP Carnegie Medal, and have appeared on the Junior Library Guild, Amelia Bloomer Project, Kids’ Indie Next, and ALA Rainbow lists. They’ve also been covered in media outlets including Entertainment Weekly, The Guardian, The Chicago Tribune, Teen Vogue, NPR, Buzzfeed, Vulture, Huffington Post, Vice, and Bustle.

Her short stories have appeared in the young adult collections Toil & Trouble: 15 Tales of Women & Witchcraft, All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories of Queer Teens throughout the Ages, A Tyranny of Petticoats: 15 Stories of Belles, Bank Robbers and Other Badass Girls, and Feral Youth.

Follow @robin_talley on Twitter, on Amazon, on Goodreads, Visit robintalley.com, Buy The Love Curse of Melody Mcintyre

About the book

Melody McIntyre, stage manager extraordinaire, has a plan for everything.

What she doesn’t have? Success with love. Every time she falls for someone during a school performance, both the romance and the show end in catastrophe. So, Mel swears off any entanglements until their upcoming production of Les Mis is over.

Of course, Mel didn’t count on Odile Rose, rising star in the acting world, auditioning for the spring performance. And she definitely didn’t expect Odile to be sweet and funny, and care as much about the play’s success as Mel.

Which means that Melody McIntyre’s only plan now is trying desperately not to fall in love.

Review

First thoughts - goodness how extremely serious do they take their plays, musicals and world of theatre in general. Then multiply that by drama and teenage angst tenfold, add on years of superstition and the result is a bubbling mess of a stage manager called Melody.

Melody believes that curses determine the success or failure of the production she is in charge of. Some of the curses seem to be made up as they go along, such as deciding that Melody's love life has a negative impact on their show, hence her being forbidden from falling in love henceforth. Sounds a lot easier than it actually is, especially when love is closer to her than she thinks.

I took a step back from this after reading it and thought about the story in relation to other work by Talley, who has without a doubt been able to bring social commentary, racism, identity politics, civil rights, sexual identity and discrimination to the table for YA genre - in a way that is both hard-hitting, relatable and empowering. Her thought process is always to ensure something remains long after the read. I will never forget reading Lies We Tell Ourselves. There is a reason she is a critically acclaimed author.

With that in mind I wondered at the seeming simplicity and what appears to be a lot of teenage angst, drama and common YA unicorn fluff. What is it that lurks beneath the surface of the water as the reader bobs for the apple?  

Buy The Love Curse of Melody Mcintyre at Amazon Uk or go to Goodreads for any other retailer. Publisher: HQ Young Adult; pub date 12 Nov. 2020. Buy at Amazon com. At Hive.co.uk. At Bookshop.org