Review: Overnight Sensation by Hal Eisenberg

Author: Hal Eisenberg

Publisher: Bells and Castanets

Page Count: 238 pages, Paperback

Date Published: July 28th 2012

Find it on Goodreads: Overnight Sensation

Source: A copy was sent to me from the author in exchange for an honest review.

Rating:  3.5/5

 Fifteen year-old Jonah Levine is practically invisible at Applecrest High. His Facebook page is pathetic, his baseball skills are mediocre at best, and his IQ seems to drop 50 points when talking to girls. But everything changes when his rock band, Hitstreak, becomes the hottest teen sensation in the country. And now they’re about to perform in front of 15,000 screaming fans.

So why isn’t he jumping for joy?


Well, for starters, that hit on the radio wasn’t really recorded by his band. In fact, six months ago, he and his friends could barely play a note between them. And now they’re about to perform in front of 15,000 screaming fans. What begins as a mindless prank quickly spins out of control, involving his father’s secret past as a 70’s rocker, a high school bully who wants in on the action, and a powerful, ruthless, media mogul who will stop at nothing to claim the band as his own. Will Jonah prevail? Or will he and his band go down in flames and become the biggest farce in pop music history?

My Thoughts: Entertaining and fun, I enjoyed it quite a bit!

 I have not read many books like this, where it is just pure contemporary, super fun, and from a male perspective. It was a nice change! Jonah was a 15 year old, so my age, so it was kind of fun reading from his POV. The entire time I was reading I was mostly wondering, is this how my friends think? I loved being in Jonah's head during the times where him and his crush Theresa were interacting. They were really awkward and sweet, kind of realistic. Although there were some issues that I'll get into later. I did enjoy Jonah's character. He was a bit bland at first, in my opinion, but I began to like him more and more as the conflict grew and he started to make better decisions. The other characters were mostly just 'there' for me, I didn't feel much for them. I wish the author had put a little bit more time into developing the secondary characters. It would have been nice to learn a bit more about them!

The only thing I had problems with involving this book was some of the writing, and a few more than acceptable punctuation/spelling mistakes. I found the writing to be really awkward at times and I got a bit bored. There was some choppiness and it took me a while to get through some parts because it was a bit dull. But I got through that as the story was entertaining and I hadn't read anything like it before. A bit far-fetched, but fun nonetheless. What really bothered me was the punctuation and grammatical errors in some parts. At the beginning it didn't bother me too much as it was just a few missing quotation marks and a few typos, but as I read on, I noticed more and more. Now, it's not that big of a deal, but it did slow me down at a few parts with my OCD tendencies. There were some points where I didn't know who was talking or if they had stopped and that became a bit irritating. I think if there had been one more read-through before publication, it could have been fixed.

Overall, this was a fun book that kept me occupied on a long car ride! I enjoyed the musical aspect to it and the way I could relate to the characters that were my age. I liked Eisenberg's creativity and expect to see a few more good books from him in the future.

Happy reading!
~Kristy