Songs About a Girl, by Chris Russell

Songs About a Girl is the debut novel from Chris Russell, and also the title of the debut album from hot new superstar boyband Fire&lights. The book opens with Olly Samson, a formerly ordinary 18 year old from Reading, who went to school and liked singing and had a lot a friends. Olly Samson has just got in touch with protagonist Charlie Bloom; a shy, retiring nobody, a year 11 student and amateur photographer that is invisible to the majority of the school population. That’s fine by her because she prefers to go unnoticed. Olly Samson is also a member of Fire&Lights and he’s just messaged Charlie on Facebook asking her to attend one of their sell out arena gigs as a backstage photographer.

Initially freaked out, she declines and shares the news with her computer nerd best friend Melissa (incidentally a hardcore Fire&Ligts obsessive) who talks her into changing her mind. Charlie attends the gig with her battered, second hand camera and bonds with the band. They get friendly, her candid shots are good, they go down well with the fans and the management. She becomes something of a regular at their shows, travelling around the UK to different cities, growing closer to moody Gabe and nice guy Ollie. But when a photo of her and Gabe is leaked onto a fan blog, her identity is revealed by online trolls and Charlie gets plunged into the paparazzi filled world of celebrity and anonymous, online abuse.

There’s also a bit of mystery thrown in when Charlie realises that a lot of Fire&Light’s lyrics bear a striking resemblance to snippets of poetry in her dead mother’s notebooks, lifted word for word from the pages. How can that be? Are the songs about her? Are her and Gabe connected in ways deeper than rock star and a girl ‘not-like-other-girls’?

I must guiltily confess, as bad and as awful as it probably makes me, that I really did not get on with this book. I’ve thought hard about whether or not I should review it or just let it go- but I want to be properly honest. It falls into quite a few of the YA pitfalls (Kooky best friend, at least one deceased parent, love triangle, not like other girls) and I found the prose style quite disjointed and bitty and a bit too propped up by adverbs.

Firstly, I found the characters incredibly one dimensional. As the reader, I wanted to get in Charlie’ s head more, really connect with her insecurities and fears. I love the introvert character type, identify with it hugely. But there was nothing here. I wanted to go with her on a journey somewhere, be there when she realises her true worth. Unfortunately she is characterised mostly by a beanie hat. Her only worth seems to come from having lads punching each other in the face over her. I was just wistfully remembering Toria from Juno Dawson’s All of The Above and what an EXCELLENT hipster loner weirdo she is.

The members of Fire&Lights were also flat, stock characters that were more annoying than anything else. Yuki was immature and irritating, throwing food literally ALL THE TIME, engaging in lame, cringey banter that I guess was supposed to be funny and endearing but just made him seem like an overgrown child. Aiden, the blonde Irish one (wonder who that’s supposed to be?) was just straight up dull. The sensitive one, has a guitar, the one that seems really normal. Gabe and Olly. Fire and light. One a lean, intense feisty bad boy, the other a muscular nice guy and impulsive protector. Points two and three of the love triangle.

Speaking of which, the Young Adult audience has had more than its fair share of love triangles, and this book just delivers another average arc. The steamy, volatile bad boy; dangerous, exciting, sexy. Or the guy who’s just really nice. The one that treats you well, is there when he says he will be, and doesn’t let you down. Lots of to-ing and fro-ing, while still quite being convinced that *neither* of them could possibly like her.

I get that I’m not the target audience for this. I know that Boy Band Lit is alive and well, and that this will almost certainly be a welcome and much enjoyed addition to that genre. Fans of Girl Online are going to love it; girl with camera forms unlikely relationship with sex god rock star. Internet fandom launches hate campaign against girl. Girl regroups.

This book will probably be very popular, and I hope that it is a success. It’s wish fulfilment fame fantasy of the highest, most fulfilling order. It’s Cinderella for the tumblr generation. I just really didn’t like it- but I’m going to assume that won’t have any impact on its popularity.


Thank you to @HachetteKids for the review copy- I'm sorry I wasn't feeling it on this occasion

Remix, by Non Pratt

Remix is a whirlwind weekend for school leavers Ruby and Kaz who are looking for an opportunity to blow of some post GCSE steam and to get over some ex boyfriends. Ruby is looking to forget all about her tattooed, pierced and be-biceped bad boy Stu, who is generally acknowledged at this stage to be a bit of a scumbag. Kaz is hoping to bump into rugby playing, short-trouser wearing Tom, who has inexplicably dumped her after years of being one half of love's young dream. The pair's favourite band Gold'ntone are playing, there will be bands, there will be boys, there will be booze. Obviously things don't go entirely to plan. Kaz and Ruby have their friendship tested over the course of the weekend by intruders (in the shape of hanger-on Lauren, Tom's secret new girlfriend hell bent on befriending Kaz) Rockstars that aren't all they've cracked up to be, exes showing up where they're not planned, brothers having strops, secrets, lies and gossip.

I've been to 5 festivals in my life, so I'm not exactly Kate Moss in Hunter Wellies, fringe and artfully dishevelled "Festival hair"/flower crown, but I've been to enough to totally identify with Ruby's initial experience. Well, some of them at least. The whole 'I get these people, these are my people' thoughts. Like normal life isn't quite real, and all the people at this festival are somehow part of your tribe and now the mother ship has called you home and you're all going to live forever more in this mud and bunting Utopia. I really liked how authentic that felt and it kind of made me yearn for all the gross fun of festivals.

There were loooooads of things I loved about this book. I loved that it was mostly about friendship and the ups and downs that come with intense relationships. Yes there is romance involved, but the plot focuses more on how romance affects friendship, how mates react to their friends dealing with mistakes and heartbreak, and how messed up everything can get when things aren't talked about. Ruby and Kaz were brilliant characters and I totally loved them both. Shout out also to the brilliant supporting cast, especially Ruby's bro Lee and his boyfriend Owen, who brought so much more to the story. They made it also about brother/sister relationships, and sister/brother's BF relationships and the whole massive web of connections and links that ripple out and out across everybody in a person's life. Not just about teen romance and love triangles but the whole domino effect.

Although I loved the story and all its drama, I found to my surprise that I found it quite difficult to keep the characters of Kaz and Ruby separate in my head...Though the girls themselves are very different (Ruby is obviously much more boisterous and outspoken, wheras Kaz is measured and day-dreamy) their style of speech was quite similar. And both characters still had dialogue in the other one's sections, so I found myself constantly thinking- whose bit is this? Whose thoughts are these? Though it was the same technique employed in Non's earlier book Trouble, I felt that I slipped into the minds of Hannah and Aaron much easier, and could keep their unique voices completely organised in my head. Though Ruby and Kaz are chalk and cheese, I think the voice is similar...and that made me struggle with this book more than I had expected.

I really liked this book, and would definitely recommend it to older teens- I just think they'd get the most out of it. Though other girls nicking your bestie is a popular theme in Middle Grade fiction, I feel it's seen less often in YA, which often has more of a romance-related-peril tone. I think Non has really channelled 16 year old brains here- she's really captured how important and identity-defining music is at 16, how desperately we cling to friends at that age, how much we dread them finding someone better. It is after all much easier to share a BFF with a boyfriend than it is to share them with another friend, again something that is explored beautifully in this story.

So maybe it doesn't have an overtly happy ending, but it's a positive ending. The book shows that people can make stupid mistakes and not be awful, terrible people. It shows that sometimes you can be wrong about people. Sometimes you can come back from mistakes and sometimes it's best to just write it off and move on. Families are complicated, friendships are complicated and being a teenager is impossible because you're never really entirely sure what you want, what to do when you've got it, or if it's worth what it cost to get it. A really, really enjoyable read that I hope will start a trend for more brilliant books about female friendships and the things that test them.

Broadway Book Club Discussion of The Half Blood Blues, by Esi Edugyan

About half of us in attendance managed to finish the book, some citing a grating style of prose as the reason for abandoning, some were unmotivated to continue by the lacklustre plot and characters. Those that did finish found it a bit of a chore, and hadn't enjoyed it hugely.

We thought that the setting was fascinating and loved the idea of getting a glimpse into the lives of black and mixed race Germans/Americans living in soon-to-be-Nazi Germany and how difficult life must have been, but we felt that the story itself wasn't really worth telling and we felt that it wasn't executed particularly well. Jazz is often presented as a sort of magnet for social oddballs, drawing people in from society's fringes, so thematically it married really well with between-the-Wars Berlin, which apparently attracted lots of renegade fringe artists and musicians at that time. It was commented that the writing style was quite unconvincing and Sid’s vernacular was a little slapdash- one member remarked that the prose was an odd and inconsistent mixture of literary and patois which was off-putting. We thought the author was probably an excellent historian, who painstakingly researched the era and crafted the architecture of Berlin and Paris very well, but forgot to add enough foreground. Being a good historian doesn't necessarily make a good storyteller.

As far as the characters go, I think confusion and dislike were most prevalent. Sid in particular won no fans- while I myself mostly felt sorry for him, many others found him thoroughly dislikeable, bitter and jealous. Overall we found Sid to be a generally terrible person, Chip to be a huge liar and Heiro to be a massive contradiction. The Heiro of the novel's beginning (chronologically the end) seemed to be a totally different person to the Heiro that was in the rest of the novel. In the beginning, he seems like a reckless and headstrong young kid whose stubborn desire for milk leads to him being seized by the Nazis. The Heiro in the rest of the novel is a shy, naive protégée who barely speaks two words together. It just didn’t add up. In a similar sense, many of us struggled to get the timeline in order- the jumping around from the 1930s to the 1990s was easy enough, but the order of events in the 1930s became a bit muddled and we were never sure how long certain scenes went on for (were they hiding out at the club for days? Weeks? It was hard to tell)

One member (who it has to be said, was the only person present that knew anything about Jazz) found the Jazz of the story unconvincing, particularly the way the characters cut the record, and the way the characters appeared to have no training or context, they just popped up out of nowhere. We also agreed that the presentation of the Jazz musician’s lifestyle seemed a bit stereotypical, which disconnected us further from the characters.

We discussed the appearance 2/3 of the way through of Louis Armstrong and how disjointed this felt within the narrative. We agreed it was unconvincing and incongruous for a real-life figure to pop up amongst fictional creations. We felt this might have worked better if this character was a new creation inspired by the real life Louis, rather than randomly inserting him into the narrative. In an already hazy book, this attempt at blurring the line between fiction and reality just didn't pay off.

We discussed the ending, (for those of us that got to it!) and concluded that it felt rushed, too keen to tie up the loose ends. Apart from being slightly unbelievable, it felt odd. We just couldn't believe that Chip, a generally unpleasant character didn't have an agenda for seeking out his long-thought-dead friend. We also though Hiro would have been considerably more angry at Sid’s revelation.

In conclusion. we felt that it focused too much on the love triangle and jealousy element, and kind of forgot about the musical and social elements of the story. One member described it as Hollyoaks meets Fear & Loathing in Nazi Germany, which just about sums it up! Though there were some compelling scenes (mostly fleeing Berlin and Paris) and some characters that we really liked that died or disappeared early (Paul, mostly) I think it was a resounding ‘Meh’ from most of us.