Happy Birthday to Me by Brian Rowe

Stars: 4.5

Summary from Goodreads:

Seventeen-year-old Cameron Martin has a huge problem: he’s aging a whole year of his life with each passing day!
High school is hard enough; imagine rapidly aging from seventeen to seventy in a matter of weeks, with no logical explanation, and with prom, graduation, and the state championship basketball game all on the horizon. That’s what happens to Cameron, a popular pretty boy who's never had to face a day looking anything but perfect.
All Cameron wants to do is go back to normal, but no one, not even the best doctors, can diagnose his condition. When he finds love with a mysterious young woman, however, he realizes his only hope for survival might be with the one person who started his condition in the first place...


Review:

Happy Birthday to Me by Brian Rowe was shockingly awesome. Rowe's cute, whimsical way of writing reminded me of You Wish by Mandy Hubbard.

I went into the book disliking Cameron (giggling). He was so full of himself. He’s the kind of person who would love to stare at himself in a mirror all day and do superman poses. But more then that, I felt incredibly embarrassed for him. I literally had to put the book down for a few minutes because he was making an idiot out of himself by being the total drama queen that he was, and he didn’t even notice.

That resulted in me being incredibly embarrassed for him. I also kind of felt sorry for him, because his super busy dad only seemed to show up when he was pressuring Cameron to follow in his footsteps and be a plastic surgeon or nagging him to be a better basketball player. So basically this means in the beginning of the book I was caught in the constant cycle of being sorry for him/ wanting to slap him. Hard.

What I really enjoyed about Happy Birthday to me was that when Cameron started aging he found out who his real friends were and how his family could genuinely act. Before he started aging, I could’ve (but I didn’t want to) put down the book, but after I was hooked. Everything started getting interesting, and I found myself wanting to see where all the character relationships went. The cycle of sorry/ slapping was broken. By that point I actually started to like Cameron.

Liesel is still mysterious by the end of the book. I hope that’ll change when the second book, Happy Birthday to me Again, comes out. I will defiantly be buying the sequel!

Thank you to Brain Rowe for providing me a review copy!