Tag: musical novels

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Book Review: ‘Rhythm & Muse’ by India Hill Brown

*Given an advanced reading copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review*

Rhythm & Muse by India Hill Brown is a predictable young adult romance novel giving us the perspective of the boy pining for the popular girl he has a crush on.

Darren likes Delia Dawson, the popular girl at his school known as Dillie who has her own podcast Dillie D in the Place to Be. He has Delia Daydreams, in which his best friend Justin always keeps shaking him out of. One day, Justin gets to spend time with his wannabe rapper cousin in a recording studio session. Darren tags along though he knows Justin’s cousin doesn’t have the rhythmic talent necessary to be a decent rapper. While in the studio, after listening to awful raps, Darren and Justin perk up to the cousin’s beats. Justin pushes Darren to sing on the beat for fun. Darren used to sing in the choir, but a mortifying experience made him drop out of choir and put his music dreams on hold. But he sings anyway – about Delia. Coincidentally, Delia’s podcast is running a competition for a new jingle. Somehow the track Darren recorded was submitted anonymously. As podcast listeners groove to Darren’s track, he can’t let anyone know he recorded it, especially Delia. He realizes they attend the same church, though he hadn’t been there in a while. He joins Delia on an all-night church sleepover where they bond over 90s R&B and their suspicions on the anonymous song that’s growing in popularity. While Darren gets closer to his dream girl, he second-guesses every move until Delia makes him more comfortable in the moment. When Delia announces the winning song of the competition, Darren knows it’s his chance to tell her the truth. But he still second-guesses telling her the truth, which endangers the relationship they are trying to build.

First, Darren’s obsession with Delia makes him a boring character. Yes, he sings, but the reason why he stopped is weak, and it is built up too much throughout the story to be that weak. The incident that has taken him away from music also has decreased his desire for college, in which he is working with a high school counselor. His second-guessing with Delia eliminates tension between the characters too quickly. He already has the girl the minute they click, which makes for a predictable ending. Other issues like his parents being married and in love and having simple dialogue adds to the boringness in the family of characters. Not saying we need a divorce, but the parents didn’t add enough tension to the situation. His love for 90s R&B could be a questionable decision since today’s teens are most likely listening to contemporary artists. Though it’s talked about how his parents taught him to love 90s R&B, it comes off as inauthentic with a music-obsessed teen not aligning himself more with music topping the charts now.

Overall, this young adult debut reads on the bland side with the unexciting characters and developments. It seems like a safe choice in YA literature as the genre continues to be battered by the banned books movement. The entire point of a romance novel is to reach the happily-ever-after, but when the main character’s personality is too tied to the person they want to be with and the tension falls apart too quickly, the story becomes less entertaining.

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Book Review: ‘Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm’ by Laura Warrell

Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm by Laura Warrell is a literary fiction novel that introduces us to a womanizing jazz musician and the females who cross his path, including his daughter. 

It’s 2013, and Circus Palmer is a 40-year-old trumpet player who takes gigs across the country but doesn’t like to plant roots anywhere. In the first few pages, he learns that Maggie, the woman who enthralls him, is pregnant. He tries to convince her to end the pregnancy; he can’t be rooted down to anything. And she shouldn’t root herself down since she’s a drummer. A child can’t fit into their musician-touring life. Maggie says she wants the baby, and she returns to drumming while Circus heads home to Boston. We meet his 14-year-old daughter Koko, who’s trying to navigate high school and control her fluctuating hormones. With Circus back in the picture, Koko still harbors the emptiness she felt for years living without him and living with her regretful, depressed mother, Circus’ ex-wife Pia.

While Koko and Pia are constants in Circus’ life, the jazzman finds himself constantly attracted to other women. He falls for a twenty-something waitress at a bar where he plays for gigs, for a mysterious woman on the train, for a woman who will do anything for him when he visits her in nearby Providence, Rhode Island. He comes across a woman he wanted to marry years ago while he witnesses the decline of the woman he did marry by the weight of taking care of their daughter and desiring love from him. All these women still don’t make up for losing Maggie and the child she may be carrying. As he wonders about that child, he realizes the need to focus on Koko as his daughter falls for boys who remind him of himself. Though his dream of recording an album still lingers in the background, his womanizing cripples his ability to assume the fame he swears he can taste. 

Unpeeling the layers of the womanizer and the women hurt by the actions make for an absorbing story. It switches between perspectives with the trail of women Circus leaves in his wake. Even meeting the women who spend one night with him show how his carelessness can feel magnitudinous to the women he hurts. Koko detects the pain he is causing other women because her mother lives with the pain on a deeper level. So, the added thread of a teenage daughter hungry for love seeing her father also hungry for love gives the story more depth. And Circus, of course, doesn’t put two and two together about how his actions affect Koko or his career. He thinks his womanizing helps him stay away as a father in case he messes up parenthood and helps him stay creative with his music when a muse disappears. Yet, the dependence on women derails his future, as he lives in a pattern of unfulfilled opportunities.

Overall, the book introduces characters who are intriguing as they sift through their emotions after welcoming Circus or re-welcoming him into their lives. Watching the characters come into their feelings on the pages make the story memorable as if you know the characters. The smoothness of the details about their everyday lives also hops off the page.

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Book Review: ‘The Final Revival of Opal & Nev’ by Dawnie Walton

The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton reexamines the trials and tribulations of a fictional 1970s soul rock band fronted by a White British man and an Black American woman who see their rise decline during a racial riot at a major concert. Marked with exquisite detail, the story trips up on telling multiple perspectives to the point it’s difficult to connect with the many characters and their worlds.

Sunny Shelton is a music journalist and the daughter of Jimmy Curtis, a drummer who was fatally beaten during a 1971 concert featuring the top talent from up-and-coming label Rivington Records. What sparked the melee was the conflict between Opal & Nev, an interracial soul rock group, and the Bond Brothers, a Southern White band who brought the Confederate flag on stage. Opal, a Black woman from Detroit who summered in Alabama when she was young, hated that the Bond Brothers had the audacity to bring this oft-perceived offensive symbol of oppression on stage. The history of how the concert went south becomes fascination for Sunny who revisits all the players decades later to write a book about the events that led to her father’s untimely death. And the fact that Opal was having an affair with Sunny’s father at the time of the concert blurs the emotions of Sunny’s journalism as she tries to revive a music magazine as editor in chief.

The book is packed with details that the story of Opal & Nev feels authentic. The story focuses on this band, but the story comes full circle with the band’s influence on the deadly concert that becomes part of music history on the level of Woodstock. The details also become problematic where the characters become sidelined by telling their stories to Sunny, who as a narrator fades in the background but reappears toward the end as she pieces who was at fault for her father’s death. The plot is reminiscent to Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, but in that masterpiece the journalist with the dead father and the Hollywood actress are the only perspectives the reader receives with their stories intertwining at the end as well. In Evelyn Hugo, the characters’ truths flow well with the same story backdrop of a journalist’s interview process highlighting an icon’s journey where in Opal & Nev that technique fails especially with the characters’ truths changing almost every page, so a character’s thought process gets amputated by another character’s thought process.

Opal is supposed to be the main character, but when the story is not told from her point-of-view, it seems like a loss for the reader to really get to know how magical she seems to be. She is presented to us as this badass Black female singer struggling to become a star amid the civil rights movement who has elements of Betty Davis or Tina Turner, overshadowed by a male musician but finds her voice. But her voice is misconstrued when she tries to plot revenge on the Bond Brothers and destroy the Confederate flag at a high-profile concert. This part of the story feels all too real of a Black woman trying to raise awareness about racial insensitivity yet is the scapegoat for the disaster that results from the explosive anger.

Overall, the novel features an extraordinary fictional music saga, but the characters contributing to the story get lost in the shuffle of a pretend journalistic venture. The elaborateness of the fake historical account can be awe-inspiring as well as destructive to the story’s resonance.




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