Please Be My Star is a YA romance retelling of Phantom of the Opera, with Erika being a shy, self-described creepy teenage girl and Christian being a handsome popular guy. Erika has moved to a new school and decides she wants to write and direct a one act play as part of the One-Act Stage Festival. She ends up with Christian, handsome, charming, and upright, as the star of her play. He’s enthusiastic about the role and his friends join as actors and tech for the play as well, but Erika has trouble understanding why people would want to be friends with her and why Christian in particular seems to want to get to know her better and spend time with her outside of play practice. Her view of herself as a creep is the backbone of her identity and she makes a shrine to Christian in her room that she hides behind a curtain because of how ashamed she is at the possibility of someone seeing it. She doesn’t feel like someone like her could ever be in the same realm as Christian. As the book progresses, we get to see how all of the characters have their own struggles and everyone feels like a creep and weirdo who no one will ever love, even if they seem to be externally perfect.
The art here is great! It’s very expressive and captures all the little moments and details in a charming way. Each of the characters feels fully realized, which is a feat with a bigger cast. I liked the different challenges the characters had, from pressure to remain the same to stress about what to do with one’s life, and each of them was empathetically portrayed. Christian and Erika’s relationship in particular is a nice example of how two people can view the same series of events extremely differently and misunderstandings can arise. I felt like the teen angst was well portrayed and never felt over the top or like a caricature. I like a book that is on the side of teens and portrays their issues as worthy of taking seriously, and this book did that in a nice way. I also liked that Erika sort of likes being a creep, because who among us doesn’t want to build a little shrine!
There’s nothing too offensive here to my eyes and I think it would work for 14 or 15 and up, mainly just because the emotions skew more thoughtfully mature to me. The content could be appropriate for a mature 13 year old. There’s kissing and some emotional fighting.
