Review: The author is the monster here; and that's a great thing!
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 01 16, 2014
England, the land of Bowie, and then his bastard offspring The Mission, Bauhaus and all the rest? What's not to love! And I loved almost all of this book, so I struggle a bit with the 4 or 5 star. Make it 4.5.I could smell the Aqua Net, I was so there. I felt so in tune with Sky in every way. I loved the clubs and the band's ratty living arrangements. Because I am an Anglophile and a musician, I ate it up. The humor hit my funny bone just right.I think when I stopped feeling completely in tune with Sky was when my love affair with this novel started straining around the edges.Now, it's true that Sky himself was closing himself off from his true feelings. And it's hard to describe the passage of time and the ascension up the ladder of the music business without getting too weighed down with WORK stuff. And that's the main focus when you're in a band and in that position. It'd be like any of us describing the rote actions and the million breakthroughs or tiny tragedies of our workdays. So she had to slide over all that or lose us, but in that process, it took away some of the immediacy. For some reason, I could never really picture what the dynamic was like between Sky and Brandon on the stage; I never got immersed into their stage chemistry.Artistic egos (never more extreme than in this case) can cause tremendous damage and I could swallow that, even though it was beyond frustrating. I've been in enough crazy bands to know first hand.But the slip into the near farcical near the end really pulled me right out of the book. Maybe it got too British for me! All of these things are part of the book she wanted to write and I'm just sorry I didn't feel enraptured ALL the way. My loss! But boy, the parts I did like, I loved.I love (that word again) the way Melanie writes. She is the monster here. She grabbed me by the throat and I will check out her other work. I can't even tell you the last time that happened to me as a reader.