Mad Love
Suzanne Selfors
Publisher: Walker Books for Young Readers
Release Date: January 4, 2011
Pages: 336
Source: Copy For Review

Rating: 4 stars

When you’re the daughter of the bestselling Queen of Romance, life should be pretty good. But 16-year-old Alice Amorous has been living a lie ever since her mother was secretly hospitalized for mental illness. After putting on a brave front for months, time is running out. The next book is overdue, and the Queen can’t write it. Alice needs a story for her mother—and she needs one fast.

That’s when she meets Errol, a strange boy who claims to be Cupid, who insists that Alice write about the greatest love story in history: his tragic relationship with Psyche. As Alice begins to hear Errol’s voice in her head and see things she can’t explain, she must face the truth—that she’s either inherited her mother’s madness, or Errol is for real.

Mad Love was such a cute read! This was my first Suzanne Selfors novel, but surely will not be the last. Mad Love has a fun plot – daughter of a romance Queen getting entangled with Cupid and writing his book. It was super original.

The set up of the novel was really well done. I loved the whole concept with Cupid and the “real story”. The plot never slows, it kept going on a fairly steady pace. The overall plot arc was pretty predictable, and at times I wanted to yell at Alice to just get with it already. Alice figures things out in her own way, and it was fun to see how it would all come about. Then Selfors also throws in quite a few twists that readers will not be expecting at all.

Alice was a great main character – she was very realistic. She was very mature, and I think that comes with all the responsibilites she had undertaken, but it made her even more likable. Errol bugged me at first – the first time he was introduced, I absolutely hated him. I thought he was arrogant and pompous. As the book went on, he really started to grow on me, and I really liked and admired him as a character by the novels end. Tony was a character I liked from the start. He seemed like a really sweet guy.

I would definitely recommend Mad Love. It was a book that I read basically straight through. It was so much fun reading it. While being pretty predictable, Suzanne Selfors takes time to throw a few twists that you aren’t expecting at readers.