Counting Stars

by Keris Stainton

[Joséphine]

Note: I received a finished copy for free in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Initial thoughts: This book kept things thoroughly real. It's also the kind of book I was looking for when I was still in university but couldn't find. There were quite a lot of characters to keep track of in Counting Stars but I think that that was a good thing. The depth of an individual character might have suffered a little as a result but this shifted the emphasis to the relations among them. When we're limited to one main character, we only see things from their perspective but Counting Stars negated that because things became clearer from both sides of the coin. By focusing on a variety of people, there was a lot of room of explorations of friendship, ambition, sexuality, family dynamics, social media (vlogging) and the general foray into adulthood as they seized their first stages of independence.