Amazon.com: Customer reviews: The Brightest Star

Top positive review

A Book for the Holidays

Reviewed in the United States on October 11, 2020

If you struggle with holiday blues, read this book with a good cup of coffee or tea and don’t stress about things. It has all the ingredients for a happy ending and a great recipe at the end, to boot.

5 people found this helpful

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Jean V.

A nice read

Reviewed in the United States on October 12, 2020

I liked this book, but it was a bit odd. Lauren didn't officially meet John until I was 80% through the book. A lot of the story was about Lee having cancer and then she was dropped at 80% and a footnote in the epilogue. It also didn't feel like much of a Christmas story to me either. I love Fern Michael's. This just wasn't my favorite.

24 people found this helpful

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From the United States

Kindle Customer

Awful

Reviewed in the United States on December 4, 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.

3 people found this helpful

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HkyLvr

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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N. Cooper

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. 🤦🏼‍♀️

2 people found this helpful

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Sheila book lover

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.

6 people found this helpful

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AshopR

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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booklover

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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