Mad Love

Mad Love by Suzanne Seflors

I think this was released in 2011 and it appears to be a bargain book on amazon; that should give you some indication to the quality of this book.

...THE AMAZON SUMMARY! "When you're the daughter of the bestselling Queen of Romance, life should be pretty good. But 16-year-old Alice Amorous has been living a lie ever since her mother was secretly hospitalized for mental illness. After putting on a brave front for months, time is running out. The next book is overdue, and the Queen can't write it. Alice needs a story for her mother-and she needs one fast.

That's when she meets Errol, a strange boy who claims to be Cupid, who insists that Alice write about the greatest love story in history: his tragic relationship with Psyche. As Alice begins to hear Errol's voice in her head and see things she can't explain, she must face the truth-that she's either inherited her mother's madness, or Errol is for real." AMAZON LINK OF WEIRDNESS

So.... there's too many things trying to happen in this story. WAYYY too many. Let me try to get all of the premise out first, and we can go from there.

Alice is the main character, she's 16, daughter of the 'Queen of Romance' (her mom writes a lot of romance novels), and her mom has some form of bipolar disorder that she's currently been sequestered away from the world to get treatment for (it's being kept a secret).

Alice lives in an apartment complex that her mother bought that has four tenants  the reverend, Archibald, Mrs. Bobot, Realm (Mrs. Bobot's granddaughter), and Oscar the cat (although he's not technically a person so he can't be a tenant). All of the tenants (besides Realm) know about Alice's mother's illness and have agreed to keep quiet about it. Mrs. Bobot has been made into Alice's legal guardian just in case.

Alice lives alone in her apartment, but the entire complex has certain days or times that they interact with her, and with school, she just goes to school online.

Alice also uses the money from the royalty checks her Mom's 30 novels receive.

Alice also semi-stalks this kid on a skateboard that skates by every morning at 9:30AM; his name is Tony.

I don't really care about this book, I've been struggling to write this blog post without going crazy with spoilers, and it's just getting annoying.

SO. Alice meets Cupid, Errol, whatever you want to call him. Cupid tries to convince her to write his book, and she's like NO CREEPER, then he shoots her with an arrow and she's like URMAGAWD I WANT YOUUUU and he makes her drink some clam juice to cure her, and she's like FINE I'LL WRITE YOUR BOOK. They have plenty of misadventures with that. Whatever.

So Alice needs to have a book written in order to satisfy her Mom's contract and to get more money for her Mom to continue to get treatment.

Alice also randomly discovers/figures out that Realm (who used to go by Lily and be fat) developed an eating disorder and wants to be a horror writer and blackmailed Alice to send a letter with Realm's manuscript to a publisher.

Alice also tries to kind of date Tony but not really, Tony gets more stalker-like at her and runs into everywhere around town without a lot of explanation.

Mrs. Bobot loves the reverend and tries to get him to see her and maybe love her. Archibald wants the reverend to acknowledge him in public (which he won't because he was a reverend and Archibald is gay). Archibald is by far the best character, I mean other than the cat.

Basically Alice kind of writes Errol's story amidst everything that's going on but then her Mom gets lost at the end, and it turns out that Alice can see auras and that she looked like Psyche and that she's destined to write all of Errol's story.

Alice and Tony also kiss at some point although it doesn't make sense since they've never really had a moment to develop the love between them and it's just like WHATEVER ROMANCE.

AND THROUGH THE ENTIRE BOOK THE MOOD SEEMS TO BELITTLE ROMANCE NOVELS AND ROMANCE WRITERS. WHAT THE HECK.

Alice is like, "Oh I've read so many romance novels that I should just be able to write them LOL, I GUESS I'M THE PRINCESS OF ROMANCE HUR HUR"
Realm is like, "WRITING ROMANCE NOVELS IS EASY LOL HORROR IS HARD. HUR HUR"

So the book finishes with one of those 'somehow everything comes together and all the problems are solved LOLOL' and that's it.

Uh, what?

....

I don't recommend this one unless you want to feel like someone's rubbing sandpaper all over your brain while you're reading it.

...

Happy reading!