DNF Review: All the Feels by Danika Stone

Publisher: Swoon Reads

Publication Date: June 7th, 2016

Rating: DNF

Source: eARC from Netgalley

Pages: 336

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Summary (from Goodreads):

College freshman Liv is more than just a fangirl: The Starveil movies are her life… So, when her favorite character, Captain Matt Spartan, is killed off at the end of the last movie, Liv Just. Can’t. Deal.

Tired of sitting in her room sobbing, Liv decides to launch an online campaign to bring her beloved hero back to life. With the help of her best friend, Xander, actor and steampunk cosplayer extraordinaire, she creates #SpartanSurvived, a campaign to ignite the fandom. But as her online life succeeds beyond her wildest dreams, Liv is forced to balance that with the pressures of school, her mother’s disapproval, and her (mostly nonexistent and entirely traumatic) romantic life. A trip to DragonCon with Xander might be exactly what she needs to figure out what she really wants.

All the Feels is a book about a girl who is more on the obsessive side of fandom. I've never really been a part of any kind of fandom, nor have I really had a desire to. I have never met the kind of fangirl that this story is about that I can recall. I love that people can get so passionate about something that they love, but I thought that this book was incredibly over the top and I only read about 25-30% of this book.

I think part of the fact that this book was one that I wanted to DNF was because I am not much of a contemporary reader. There are some that I have loved and I have gotten really good at picking those ones out. When I requested this book, I was off a little bit.

Liv is our over-the-top fangirl of the story. She is furious after the death of her favorite character in the Starveil movies. I can understand how the death of a favorite character can hurt, but I found her reaction to it to be a bit too much. She freaks out in the theater (granted she waits until it's mostly empty), screaming at the screen and at the boys who just want to go home after they clean the theater. She mopes around for days afterwards and doesn't ever talk about anything else.

Seriously, I only read like 45 pages of this book (that's on my nook, I don't know how many real life, flippable pages that would be) and I was already done feeling sorry for her. Even after she got less mope-y and more hopeful after she started an online campaign to get this character back, I just didn't care how it ended up for her.

Her best friend is Xander. He's into cosplay and dressing up like a nineteenth century English gentleman on a daily basis, but Starveil doesn't seem to be his thing. He's got a girlfriend who isn't Liv, but Liv obviously has feelings for him and he couldn't seem to tell. And he was always texting her when he was with Liv and trying to get Liv to hang out with them and just couldn't see that Liv didn't really like that. I found that obnoxious. 

I think that this book is probably supposed to be a bit over the top. I think that people who might be more hardcore into fandom stuff might like this. I think that people who like contemporary that's a bit fluffier would probably also like this. I'm sad that this one didn't work out for me because it just seemed light and cute and fun. Hopefully if you read it, you'll enjoy it more than I did.