Review: All The Feels

All The Feels
Rating: 4/5 
Buy or Borrow: Buy 
Source: Copy courtesy of the publisher! 

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.

Okay you guys, this book is one of those books that's scarily relatable and you're laughing and laughing and then you're like wait......that was/is me....oh dear! Honestly right from the first chapter this book was hilariously relatable. It's all about fandom and fangirls, there's Con, there's cosplay, there's fanfic, there's manips, there's vidding, there is everything that there is to do with fandom, all in one book. Welcome to the world of the fandom! 

Let's face it, we've all been there, book, movie, TV show, whatever! We've all had that one that we're completely obsessed with, that we buy all the merch for ever, that we spend all our time talking about, and thinking about, that makes us feel good, that cheers us up, the fandom that makes you feel like you belong. You watch it/read it over and over and over, you're constantly on the forums for it maybe, or you're writing fic about it or you're saving up every penny to meet the actors/author behind it all. We've all experienced the heartbreak when a favourite character, not just any favourite character, but your favourite character EVER....dies. Is killed off. Just like that. We've all experienced, the rage, the pain....THE FEELS. 

THAT is why this book is relatable. THAT is why Liv is relatable, among other things in the book. Like MRM is like....George R R Martin crossed with a load of other writers I could mention. So many....so many. You can relate to the feeling when a writer sticks you with a bad plot line, (hello PLL, how are you today? Still destroying one of my favourite characters? Yep? Okay then) or ends something really badly and you're left...well...like Liv...having a crisis in a movie theatre in the early hours of the morning after seeing the midnight premier. 

I had a feeling as soon as I started to read this book and was a few pages in to chapter one, that I was going to love this book and that it was going to be a favourite....a re-read book for me, and I wasn't wrong. I kept having to force myself to stop reading so I could sleep, because I just got lost in this book. It was funny, I wanted to know what happened next, and I became a little bit obsessed with it! I loved reading about Liv's life in the fandom, all the tweeting and the blogging and forum-ing (that's a word now shhh) and so on. The author has perfectly represented it and given us perhaps the most relatable character I've ever read. 

Liv is just perfect. Liv spends her life online, she's not all out and about and in to fashion like most female MC's in romance books. She's nerdy and proud. Liv was over dramatic to the point that I had to laugh, and she was a huge source of humour in the book. I loved her determination to #SaveSpartan. As I was reading I was like "We've all been there love, let it all out" and her reactions where just spot on. I did have a slight issue with how much she kept going on about how she doesn't think she's pretty etc, it was more than that but my brain is failing me and I can't think of the phrasing I'm after, but yeah. She commented about it a couple more times than I thought was necessary but other than that she was brilliant. 

I loved Xander, he gets all her fandom drama to an extent, and calls Liv and her fandom friends "The Coven". He's right there with her, being dragged through it without complaint, while slightly poking fun at her without being downright mean. I loved their friendship and their banter, and I loved watching it grow and change in to a relationship. He had a very interesting voice, he's a steampunk cosplayer, and he adopts a British way of speech a lot of the time! It gave him a very unique voice throughout the book to go with his unique look! 

I thought the romance was adorable, and it gave me the warm and fuzzies and was built up perfectly, it's slow to come to fruition it isn't all romance all the time straight from the beginning, you see their friendship first as Xander helps her with her mission, and they go for McDonalds runs. You also see a lot about fandom friends, seeing Liv's online relationship with her fandom friends, and then seeing her get to meet them for the first time, and I really loved how it showed that all these different types of people had come together and made friends over this movie franchise, and how it helped some of them and so on. 

The narrative of the book is brilliantly broken up with Twitter conversations, text conversations, manips and memes and so on. It was a nice touch and really helped bring Liv and her world to life. There's even a Starveil fic at the end of the book, that's mentioned in the book and it was....I can't even. This book really went all out with the fandom experience and authenticity. OH OH OH and the chapter titles? They're freaking quotes from various different fandoms, Lord of the Rings (My precious), Harry Potter, Supernatural, and more and I loved seeing which one would be picked next, and then right at the end it was a Starveil quote. *sigh* I just really enjoyed this book okay!