I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone
Punk rocker Emily Black’s daddy is a guitar player, but he set his music aside to raise her on his own after her mother disappeared. Emily grew up reasonably together and rebellious in a small Wisconsin farming town notable for its outlaw music venue, River’s Edge, where she and her best friend graduate from sleeping with potential “rock gods” to starting a band of their own. Their rapid success is the standard-issue rock-and-roll dream, but debut novelist Kuehnert makes it new by marshaling tonic energy and 100-proof candor to create a high-speed, switchback tale. Although the plotline about Emily’s miserable mother and die-hard father is almost too over-the-top, it adds dimension to Emily’s rocketing rise and painful plummet. And Kuehnert is acidly incisive and full-out entertaining as she tells a classic tale of an artist coming into her own, revels in raw punk-rock power, dramatizes just how difficult it is for women musicians to be taken seriously, and reveals that the scariest thing isn’t getting up on stage but lowering your guard and falling in love. --Donna Seaman