It's not as if the horoscopes are...real. They're all just rubbish. What's one random phrase compared to another? What harm could it do?Star-Crossed was intended as a mindless summertime bookclub pick – looking like an easy-reading rom-com outside our usual fare – but as low as that made my expectations, I don't know if author Minnie Darke even met my lowest bar for a decently written book. Not a total waste of time, but reading the disappointed reviews from regular aficionados of the romance genre, I don't know to whom I could recommend this. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms. Slightly spoilery review.)
Half an hour later, Leo's latest fax was skewered to the document stake in Justine's office, and the month's horoscopes had been submitted for layout. And if, in the process of transcription, the entry for Aquarius had been slightly transformed, well, Justine considered, the risk was minimal. Twice now she'd got away with her little sleight of hand. And, if Nick Jordan's relationship with his beautiful, lookalike girlfriend was entirely watertight and secure, then the horoscope could have no meaning for him. What harm, then, could a few minor alterations possibly do?The plot: Justine is a twenty-six-year-old wannabe journalist – working as a copy-runner (glorified gopher) at a popular monthly magazine and waiting for her break – and outside of work, she's in a lonely funk: living away from her family, her best friend has moved away, no love prospects, etc. One day Justine runs into Nick – an aspiring actor, recently broken up with the gorgeous model girlfriend who wanted him to get a real job – and as the two had been childhood friends (and briefly sweethearts) before Nick's family moved away, an easy rapport is rekindled between them. When it is revealed that Nick looks to the astrology column in Justine's magazine before making big decisions (“After all, Leo Thornbury knows everything”), the nonbelieving Justine sees an opportunity to steer Nick's heart in her own direction: If she makes just a few coded changes to his Aquarius entry, surely he'll see that she's the girl for him? Alas, as is the way with such plots, the more Justine meddles with Nick's horoscope, the more he believes that the infallible astrologer Leo Thornbury is telling him to give up acting and return to his ex-girlfriend. In addition to this main thread, Darke adds a large cast of secondary characters: Fellow Aquarians who make life-changing decisions based on Justine's fake horoscopes (and as if to acknowledge that the stars are never wrong, the seemingly unrelated actions of these characters will eventually steer Nick onto the path that Leo had originally laid out for him).
I guess my biggest problem with the plot is credibility: If there's one thing we know about Justine, it's that, after two years as a dogsbody at the magazine, she wants to be promoted to staff writer. Would she really alter a famous astrologer's column (which took a lot of sneaky skulduggery, even if Justine constantly told herself, “What's the harm?”) and risk her professional future? My biggest problem with Justine herself is that she's an annoying grammar Nazi – carrying a Sharpie to the farmer's market to fix the spelling on produce signs, amending sentence structure on restaurant menus – and to the degree that I think we're supposed to actually find this an admirable trait, I have to conclude that this is Darke's own pet peevery showing through; and grammar pedantry is no more attractive in a novel's plot than it is on a comment thread. (Related: When Justine's father calls her to explain how he had worked through the hardest clue in her magazine's cryptic crossword for the month, I got the feeling that the exchange was only included to give a history of the phrase “hoist by one's own petard”, and then make the overt connection that by meddling with the horoscopes, Justine had thusly hoisted herself; there's nothing subtle or clever about it and I think it was just Darke wanting to work the phrase in without trusting her readers to understand.) And my biggest problem overall is the handling of the astrology elements – it's hard to tell if Darke is a believer (Justine does not believe in horoscopes but her actions are always connected to her Saggitarian nature, except when influenced by her Virgo rising), and the plot elements shift between everything being random and all being fixed in the stars. Even Nick – who doesn't make a move without reading his horoscope first – has a weird initial reaction when he discovers what Justine has been up to:
Yes, she had made an idiot of him, but even worse than that, she had taken something from him. She’d spoiled it: his one little sprinkling of magic in an otherwise pragmatic world – a harmless handful of stardust and mystery, once a month, on the page of a magazine.I can't remember the last time I read my own horoscope for fun (so I'm not complaining that Darke doesn't take it all seriously enough), but I would have liked her to take a stance one way or the other (she populates the story with so many true believers but Justine's arguments against astrology are more credible than Nick's in favour). What I did like was Star-Crossed's setting in a southern Australian city, and I enjoyed travelling throughout a whole year with Justine as she describes her surroundings:
When Halloween arrives each year, with the bones of the pagan festival of Samhain still visible through its ragged cloak, it prepares the people of the northern hemisphere to hunker down for the life-or-death test that is winter, and reminds them to make their peace with the dead. But in the southern hemisphere, where Halloween comes just before the start of the cricket season, at a time of year when sunscreen sales are on the up, the night of the dead is really just an opportunity to break out an outrageous costume and concoct brightly colored alcoholic beverages.So, I wasn't completely annoyed by this read even if it sounds like it – after all, my expectations were not high – and I'm looking forward to learning what my fellow book-clubbers made of it.
