Book #3: Virtuosity by Jessica Martinez

This was a book that came highly recommended by several book bloggers I follow, so I was really interested in reading it. The book is about Carmen, a child prodigy violinist who is about to compete for the Guarneri Competition, a four-year-long fellowship which is the highest and most prestigious award in the world for young violinists. Everyone knows that she's the best--she's already won a Grammy for classical music and has a full ride to Juilliard--and her only real competition is a young British guy named Jeremy King. She meets him, and starts to like him and fall in love, and everything with her competition starts to unravel. Dun dun dunnn!

Okay, so, first off, I really enjoyed this book. It only took a few hours to read (major bonus!) and I loved the author's style. I really wish I could formulate a reason for why I like some styles and why I can't get past others, because it sounds like such a cop-out to just say "I like their writing style" and I feel like it's part of the job of a review to spell things out. But you know how with some books, you just get stuck on awkward phrases and you just know you're reading as you read? You can practically feel the author crafting every word, searching through their thesaurus for synonyms and rewording sentences? You can't ever forget the words that you're reading? But with other books you can, you skip the reading process and you get sunk into the story enough that you are IN it and you're practically one of the characters? THAT'S what I look for when I read these quick, easy novels, and that's what I get real enjoyment out of. And this book had that quality--I wasn't distracted by the writing to get to the story. So that was a real plus.

There were several elements that seemed a little odd in this book. First off, why does she call her mom by her first name? It's weird to always have the mom referred to as Diana in the book. Second, the whole boy-and-girl-get-into-fight scene that always has to happen in a romance (the girl finds out the boy started after her for a false reason at first) felt so false to me. Jeremy asks Carmen to throw the competition so he can win for his dying brother? And then Carmen still likes him enough to go away with him in the end? Now, come on. How could you trust him again? And also, can we remember that the whole course of this romance happens over less than two weeks of time and over two, MAYBE three dates? Why don't people follow NORMAL timelines when they're writing books? Or am I just crazy here? I also wasn't a huge fan of the ending. I think she went back to Juilliard, but I don't like how COMPLETELY ambiguous it was. I assumed it was because she was leaving the path open for a sequel but it doesn't look like it, after doing a few google searches.

I did like the twist at the end that changed the whole path of how the competition went, and I liked the addition of the whole issue with Carmen taking anxiety pills. I felt like that should have been a bigger deal than it was in the book though. It really could have been a much more interesting, bigger issue that complicated a lot more in the book.