Jace's Trial

Jace's Trial - J.M. Wolf This is a trope I like and there are many parts of this that are good. Sadly, the writing is a bit uneven and inconsistant in style and quality. A good editor could help with that. There is a lot of telling instead of showing while switching back and forth between characters in first person POV. We are in their heads a lot with minimal dialog and mininal descriptions of the scenes and surroundings--enough for us to get that we are in a crowd, or the forest, but not enough to picture it in our minds because of the actual words on the page. It's more noticable because the sex scenes are graphic and detailed. If you go into this thinking of it as Jace getting to live out his fantasies (landing his Dad's boyfriend, everyone seeing how awesome he is, him becoming famous, his villian getting justice, having the most romantic proposal of all time, etc.) and dismiss the blurb, then you will likely enjoy it more. This whole story takes place within two weeks with an epilogue eight months later.

Gerard seems to be in awe of Jace and treats him with more respect than anyone else does. I'm not sure why we're supposed to be so awed except we are told he is a music progeny. Most of the book consists of trying to tell us how amazing he is, flaws and all. Every other character seems to be a surrogate mother or father figure--even his best friend (Fairy Godmother) Adam, who is his age. Everyone is very up in his business and they feel like they deserve to know about his life and feelings. It's very invasive and, frankly, if he can't set better boundaries I'm not convinced he is mature enough to be someone's partner. He is also all over the map emotionally throughout this story in a very unattractive way that we are supposed to accept because of his grief. Meanwhile, Gerard doesn't come off as much better with a lot of his dialog consisting of words like "wow." He also has not set boundaries with his parents, but he's 20 years older so that's just sad.
In fact, Adam is also given hero status. I'm not sure if the bias is for recording artists or just the younger characters. Everyone in this story acts immaturely regardless of age and secondary characters are not fleshed out.

The trope, characters, and setting could have all made a good story with a little more work prior to publication.