Jacob Proffitt's Reviews > Sprinkled in the Stars

Parker, AJ's seven year-old daughter, is the highlight of this story. She is heartbreakingly authentic in her autistic glory. Morley has done a very hard thing, here. There's a reason most authors with autistic characters select the high-functioning end of the spectrum. Parker is not high-functioning. So that was outstanding.

Everything else felt like ball bearings in a dryer. Klunky, is what I'm trying to say. For anyone even a little bit visual, you have loads of things that simply don't work. Like someone doubling over in laughter as they walk through a door. It isn't that the thing wasn't actually funny (it wasn't that funny), just that someone doubling in laughter walking through a doorway is absurd. This kind of thing happens a lot and it pushes me out of the narrative every time. It's a little like the author thinks we're viewing the story through the wrong end of a telescope so she's exaggerating all the movements so people can see.

And it isn't helping that every character seems made of candy floss. They're so fragile, each in their own way and that makes for a ton of brittle interactions. And I can't help feeling like Melanie would be eaten alive if she were actually a famous actress. She's desperately naïve, which is actually kind of charming. But she's a power player in Hollywood who doesn't seem to have any power at all. Like, for example, her nasty, manipulative, gaslighting ex is somehow integral to the movie she's currently shooting? How is that even possible? Any director who let that situation develop without intervening is a stone-cold idiot. Of course, it sounds like he is just that, but that's back to the problem that this doesn't even begin to make sense as a thing that can happen.

It took forever for the two to actually meet. Like, quarter of the story long. I gave it a couple chapters after that point to see if it'd smooth out once they had some solid interaction (beyond tripping over one another). It didn't smooth out.

I'm giving this a second star because Parker is so perfect. Morley shows some talent there. But her visual cues need to align better with things that can happen for me to feel comfortable in her stories.