Center Stage! is about a high schooler named Allison Burch. She really wants to become a famous singer and open up for the hot boyband All or Nothing. So she secretly heads out to audition for the show “Center Stage!” (Think The Voice meets X Factor meets American Idol.) She smudges the year on her application so she doesn’t need her parents permission and becomes the first person on the show to get all 4 coach to want her on their teams!
After getting permission from her parents to do the show, it seems that her coach is out to sabotage her. But Allison is able to take all the curve balls thrown at her throughout the competition and over come. She ends up falling for another contestant, Elliott, but she ends up questioning if their feelings for each other are real, or if it is just another fabrication put together by the show.
The two need to team up to over come more and more obstacles put their by the show’s producers – but can they be a team when it is every man/woman for themselves in order to win the show?
As you probably know, I love American Idol. I don’t really love The Voice or XFactor as much but I’ll watch them sometimes so it was fun to read a book based on these shows with some fun drama behind the scenes. This book was a quick read and I immediately found myself drawn in wanting to see what kind of sabotage would happen next and what Allison’s reaction would be. I thought that the ending was going to end up predictable and perfect, but I was in for quite a surprise. A really great book and I hear that the author has some more books about Allison’s (former?) best friend Taylor (and daughter of Center Stage! coach Chase Atwood) so I might have to check it out and see if it is as good as Center Stage!
I received a free e-copy of this book in order to write this review. I was not otherwise compensated.
About the Book
Allison Burch’s wildest dream is to become a famous singer. She can hardly believe her own good luck when she auditions for the reality television singing competition, Center Stage!, and is chosen as a contestant. She finally has a legitimate shot at fame, fortune, and a chance to go on tour as the opening act for her favorite boy band on their world tour.
However, Allison wasn’t counting on one of the celebrity coaches being Chase Atwood, the famous rock star father of her former best friend. Allison’s terrified that Chase is going to find out that she and his daughter have been in a fight for months, and it’ll ruin her shot at the grand prize. Making matters worse, Allison’s own coach, Country Western star Nelly Fulsom, intends to groom her into a Nashville superstar.
As Allison struggles to decide if she really wants to win on the show if it’s by resorting to dirty tricks and assuming the image that Nelly wants to create for her, she find herself falling hard for her biggest competition on the show: a brooding songwriter named Elliott Mercer. She’s not sure if Elliott’s interest in her is genuine, or if he’s just playing along with the producers’ strategy.
It’s up to Allison to decide: how much is she willing to lose in order to win?
Fans of Caitlyn Duffy’s The Rock Star’s Daughter will enjoy this tale about Taylor’s friend Allison and her journey to fame.
Katie 
This book is pretty cool, it contains a collection of Victorian-era cigar bands (the bands that are wrapped around a cigar). There are all sorts of different images depicted, presidents, logos, royals, etc. The beginning of the book has the story of the collection and how it came to be as well as a brief history of the bands and how they came to be. The rest of the book is just photos of the collection. I can’t say I am much of a cigar aficionado but I found the book interesting and liked seeing all the different things that were depicted on the various cigar bands.