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  • The Brightest Star
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Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
2,414 global ratings
5 star
68%
4 star
19%
3 star
8%
2 star
3%
1 star
1%
The Brightest Star

The Brightest Star

byFern Michaels
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Top positive review

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Warren A. Lewis
5.0 out of 5 starsMixing Retail and Romance
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 25, 2023
Hard to exactly determine the genre of this one. Romance doesn't become a part of the book until the last third of the book. In the beginning Lauren Montgomery has sold her condo in Florida and moved back to her hometown in North Carolina to run her parent's Christmas shop, a family business begun by her grandfather that changed over time from a general store to a niche business. Her father refuses to allow modern technology to be a part of the business, and it is beginning to fail. Lauren has established herself as a best selling biographer, so her living is not dependent on the success of the store. Her plate is pretty full with saving the store here at Christmas time when she learns a high school classmate is suffering from a potentially deadly disease and she has pledged to help find the funds to pay for a bone marrow transplant. To top it all off, her agent calls to tell her the founder of the world's biggest on-line retailer has chosen her to write his biography, is willing to pay her $3.5 million for it, but he has to see the rough draft in six weeks or the deal if off. And he expects her to fly to see him in Seattle now, in the Christmas season. A lot going on, but a great read.
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Top critical review

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Erica Duerr
2.0 out of 5 starsOk book
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 30, 2023
I wanted to like this book based on synopsis but it was not really a romance novel. The main couple met halfway through the book and had 2 to 3 interactions. It felt rushed and we know nothing about the guy she ended up with (does he have ajob, where does he live). There was one chapter of the writing of the biography but that was such a minor part of the story it could have been left out altogether.

Too much time was spent on storylines that were dropped. The book for two thirds of it seemed slow moving focusing on the parents store, a stranger with cancer that became the main characters problem, adopting a cat, and her parents health. Most of these were left to the end and were rushed to have one line resolution. There was no character to root for as the lead seemed immature and refused to stand up for her parents. The fact that her parents refused to modernize and then took no blame for the stores struggles made me not care about it. It was a struggle to get through this book and it lacked Christmas spirit.
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From the United States

Kindle Customer
1.0 out of 5 stars Awful
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 5, 2021
Verified Purchase
The main female lead is 35 yo, but extremely juvenile. She has less maturity than the 16 year olds that she interacts with. The main characters do not meet each other until more than halfway into the story. This is love at first sight on steroids. I paid $0.99 for this book, and had no problem deleting it.
4 people found this helpful
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HkyLvr
1.0 out of 5 stars Boring
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 24, 2021
Verified Purchase
Characters boring, plot boring, then at the end ALL Of THE SUDDEN BOOM "love at first sight" - the end.....
3 people found this helpful
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AshopR
1.0 out of 5 stars Don’t waste your money or you time on this
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 30, 2021
The story is about a 35 YO successful biographical author of 3 best sellers, Lauren, who drops the life she has been building herself (quite happily) in FL to rush home and help her parents run their decor store in her hometown of North Carolina when her father is diagnosed with a debilitating illness and her mother becomes his primary caregiver. When she gets there she realizes the store is slowly failing and as the story starts, she realized she needs to put her own finances into the business to keep it afloat.

So after all but giving up writing, she is offered the opportunity of a lifetime to write a biography of a online retail mogul that will secure her future and help save her struggling publisher, plus give her money to replenish the amount she is about to dump into the antiquated store in order to save it.

Rather than it being a “no-brainer” and enthusiastic “Yes!”, she struggles with the decision because she is afraid (!) of what her parents (who, by my calculation are roughly in their 60’s) will think.

Here is why - the sick father is an awful curmudgeon who is disrespectful and blind to reality. As a previous reviewer mentioned, he is unimaginably stuck in the 50’s (okay, maybe the 70’s) way of doing things in the store, including still using the sliding credit card devices that use a mimeograph sheet of paper. Seriously? The internet has now been around for 20 years and this story is set in present day. It’s ridiculously unbelievable that he would be so against technology that his daughter has to resort to subterfuge and hiding any type of innovation she is working to introduce to the store she is now running, all to avoid his willful stubbornness and almost abusive passive-aggressive anger about change.

The Mom is a wet blanket who does not stand up for her daughter and at best, stays silent about the changes, and at worst just backs up the father’s opinions while making light of her daughter’s highly successful writing career.

Honestly, although her parents are described as well-liked around the town, there is literally no sense at all of that - no friends dropping by with casseroles, no friendly townspeople stopping in to the store to chat and see how the parents are faring… no real connection at all with the idea that these are kind, generous, and well-liked people.

The story gets muddled when a teen comes into the store with some friends and buys a gift for her very sick mother, who it turns out the main character knows, but not well. To help this teen, whom Lauren has known for about an hour, Lauren contorts herself into making connections through a teacher friend (by visiting the teacher, at the school, being allowed to go down to the teachers classroom, DURING the school day, which in and of itself is so far fetched and utterly ridiculous in this day and age given that every school in the country now requires background checks to even bring your OWN kid a lunch, that I needed to put the book down for several days out of sheer disgust at how ridiculous the idea even is) to save the mother and keep her in the hospital because clearly she knows more than the mother’s own doctors about her state of health and where she should be while she waits for treatment, which Lauren has also decided to figure out how to pay for… despite the fact that this girl is living with her best friend and her friends wealthy parents, who’ve clearly known the girl for years and years… but whatever, I digress.

Meanwhile, even though this is, in theory a Christmas story, Christmas is barely mentioned other than the fact that the store has some Christmas decorations and sells expensive, hand-crafted, glass ornaments to one customer who buys them all and drives away in their new Porsche (not really even sure why that’s included in the story other than as a plot device that shows you this store really caters exclusively to the wealthy).

Finally, about 75% of the way into the story, we meet the love interest. Up until this point it hasn’t been a love story at all, but rather a story about a woman trying to help her family, re-build her career, and find satisfaction in meaningful, albeit over/the-top, gestures of giving.

At this point, many of the other subplots that have been built into the story fall to the wayside as though they were just marginal plot devices and not the bulk of the whole story. Including her father’s miraculous medication, which makes him kick her out of the store claiming she’s been doing a terrible job and it’s her fault sales have been on the decline, despite having sunk enough of her own m money into the business to keep it afloat for several months.

We spend the next several chapters in Seattle with the love interest and Lauren’s interviews and relationship building with the mogul and his family. We hear practically nothing about what’s happening with all the other major stories from home.

Finally she returns home, and is only able to convince her family to improve the store because another old man convinces her Dad to do it. He still would not listen to her.

Ugh. And the love story is just blah. There’s no tension or build up. Just - they looked at each other, talked during a plane flight, and now are committed to each other for the rest of their lives.

So disappointing on so many levels. Don’t waste your money or even your time on this one…
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N. Cooper
1.0 out of 5 stars Just not good! At all!
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 19, 2021
I finished this book just now and I’ve been sitting here wondering why I wasted my life reading it.

One, it’s not even really a Christmas book at all.

Two, the author spends all her time describing mundane things (like the weather, the temperature in the shop) and not, you know, the ROMANCE.

Three, the author spends 90% (250+ pages) of the book talking about overbearing scared to death of internet parents (they don’t even own cell phones in 2019) and then BOOM, in two pages everything is fixed.

Four, Lee’s leukemia and her daughter play a huge role in the beginning of the book (again 200+ pages) and then are dismissed within a few pages at the end.

I’m not sure what happened to this book, the author, the editor, etc. but it’s A MESS. I can’t believe I wasted my time reading it. 🤦🏼‍♀️
3 people found this helpful
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Sheila book lover
1.0 out of 5 stars Horrible
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 13, 2020
In 2020 Fern Michael still thinks its ok to make fun of fat people. That is not ok. I stopped reading the book after that.
8 people found this helpful
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booklover
1.0 out of 5 stars Definitely NOT a "bright star" of a book
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 16, 2020
This may possibly be one of her worst books. The writing was that of a high school student in a fiction writing course. The book was difficult to get into especially with the strange relationship with her parents in the beginning of the book. There were characters introduced and then left floundering until the epilogue.
4 people found this helpful
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amazon shopper
1.0 out of 5 stars Way beyond believable
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 1, 2022
Verified Purchase
This book is a rushed, jumbled, unbelievable mess! Who would transfer funds to a fifteen year old
that they met a few times.... Lauren also meets a man she childishly calls "Mr Hunk" and lo and behold
after meeting him a few times more marries him. That is the last book I will buy from this author.
Her books do not make any sense anymore, and are a complete waste of time and money!
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