In the Cards: Fame by Mariah Fredericks

In the previous book (In the cards: Love) we met Eve and her friends Anna and Sydney; and when Anna's elderly neighbor died she left Anna one of her cats (eventually Syd and Eve adopted the other two) and a deck of Tarot Cards which in In the Cards:Love turned Anna's life upside down. Here's the thing about the cards: they are spot-on accurate, but they only show you a fraction of what's going to happen.

Now, in Fame, it's Eve's turn to ask the cards and she was one question only: will she be a star? Because that's all she wants, to be famous - at the beginning her reasoning for it was kind of blah for me - but, and even though she thinks of herself as very brave, Eve doesn't dare to ask about the rest of her life because... what if the cards tell her she will be a nobody forever? Instead, she asks about her school's upcoming production of Cabaret.

The cards are talking but they are sending mixed signals. In the end, Eve gets a smallish part on Cabaret and, for various reasons, decides to stick to it even as she and pretty much everyone else in the cast resent Francesca, the girl who got the lead in the play and who also happens to be the daughter of an important music producer and judge of You Suck! (and American Idol type of show), thinking everything is SO easy for Francesca -even though she's almost cripplingly shy and no one is nice to her and she really does have a hard time with the play in general.

As the opening night draws near, the possibility that Francesca's insecurities will keep her from being the leading lady begins to loom, so the teacher in charge asks Eve and Evil-Alexa (another girl in the cast) to learn the part, but asks them no to tell Franscesca - so the girl doesn't have her confidence crushed - but, of course, Evil-Alexa has to live up to her name, right?

In the end... will Eve be the star of the show? or will her dreams of fame vanish into thin air?

Well, you'll have to read to find out.

I have to say that Eve is not a character I like, and more than once in the first fifty pages I thought of putting down the book and skipping to the next one. But in the end, I cared enough for Eve's friends Syd and Anna (and Anna's on-going possible love triangle, which came to a happy conclusion for me) to keep on reading and, by the end, I didn't dislike Eve so much.

She'll never be my favorite character but her story is worth reading.

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