Synopsis: 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.
This book is DARLING. No, seriously, you do not [yet] fathom my deep fandom-esque love for All the Feels (see what I did there?). I knew from the second that I picked this book up that it was going to be charming. I knew there would be a heavy emphasis on FANDOM, a topic I’m very fond of. But I what I didn’t know was that this would be such a fiercely adorkable story.
Over the last few months, I’ve become immersed in the online book community like never before. I didn’t realize it was possible to make true friends without living near someone and seeing him or her regularly. I was, in short, a fool. Because in the past few months I’ve connected deeply with my fellow bloggers and bookstagrammers, and I feel at home in this wonderful, bookish, online family.
And that, my friends, is what All the Feels is really about.
This book takes fandoms – the online fervor that comes from gathering together and swooning over the same thing, the crazed (but wonderful) atmosphere you’ll find at any Con (from BookCon to ComicCon and back again), and the trials of balancing a full “unplugged” life and a full online one.
Though I’m not as shy as Liv, I connected to her immediately. We all know what it feels like to have a favorite character die. It’s gut-wrenching. It feels real. Just ask any person who has become too attached to a GoT character or watched Gandalf die in Moria without knowing he’s going to come back in Two Towers. The thing about loving something (whether or not it’s real in the traditional sense) is that that thing comes to matter to you. It becomes, for better or worse, a REAL part of you and your life.
So I adored the fact that Liv decides to launch a crazy plan to bring her favorite character, Spartan, back from the dead. It was a beautiful illustration of the power fans hold over their favorite shows. I mean, not to date this review with even more pop culture, but isn’t that basically what Jon Snow fans recently did? There was no way HBO could leave him “dead” with all the backlash they got from fans. Fans are vital to a franchise.
Also, Xander is just freaking adorable. I have never been so interested in cosplay a day in my life, but man, did he make it sound sexy. I was head-over-heels for him, and rooting for Liv and his relationship from page one. The ONLY (and I mean ONLY) thing I didn’t LOVE about Xander was his extreme overuse of the word dearest. That started to grate on me about five chapters in and didn’t stop.
This is perhaps my favorite Swoon Reads read of all time. It’s got plenty of humor, a cast of quirkly-in-all-the-right-ways characters, twists and turns to keep your heart racing in anticipation, and a truly swoon-worthy romance. Plus there is lots and lots of nerdy fandom thrown in for good measure.
All the Feels was a one-sitting kind of book that I couldn’t put down. If you love charming contemporaries like Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl, then I doubt you’ll be able to put it down either.
Rating: 4.7/5 stars
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