July 29, 2024
In the dramatic if superficial latest from Stapley (Lucky), a rock star becomes infamous after she’s blamed for the disappearance and presumed death of her bandmate husband. Jane Pyre, bassist for the legendary Lightning Bottles, which she formed in the early 1990s with frontman Elijah Hart, is now living in a remote part of Germany, five years after Elijah’s disappearance in Reykjavik. Her isolation ends when her next-door neighbor Hen, a 17-year-old Lightning Bottles fan, alerts her to a photo she saw online of graffiti in Berlin, which might contain a message from Elijah. A clue from the art sends them on a road trip to other locations around Europe, where they find more drawings in a similar style, giving Jane hope that Elijah might be alive. The narrative flits between the women’s quest and the band’s early years, when Jane is discouraged by her religious mother and dismissed by music journalists, who prefer to focus on Elijah and ignore her songwriting contributions. Later, she’s blamed by the public for Elijah’s self-destructive drug use. While the novel plausibly conveys the pitfalls of fame, Stapley introduces but neglects to explore heavier themes of codependency and exploitation. There’s a bit too much filler in this ’90s nostalgia trip. Agent: Samantha Haywood, Transatlantic Agency.
August 1, 2024
A reviled musician chases clues that her former bandmate and husband is alive and searches for him, accompanied by an unexpected party. In 1999, 17-year-old Henrietta V�gel listens to a radio broadcast commemorating five years since Elijah Hart, "front man of the multiplatinum-selling husband-and-wife duo, the Lightning Bottles," disappeared in Iceland. Jane Pyre, Elijah's disgraced bandmate and wife, arrives in rural W�lf, Germany, and discovers that the secluded farmhouse she purchased as an escape has a close neighbor--none other than Hen, who insists that Elijah is alive and trying to communicate with Jane via street art, convincing Jane that they have to follow the clues in the art to find him. Lengthy flashbacks that start 10 years earlier show Elijah and Jane, born Janet Ribeiro, bonding and falling in love from 2,400 miles apart via music-focused BBS chat rooms and lengthy letters. Jane travels to Seattle to be with Elijah and they form the Lightning Bottles, though their romance and rise to fame are plagued by friendship drama, family tragedy, sexism against Jane, a legal battle over song ownership, and addiction. Some readers might be pleased to recognize real influential people (William Orbit, Steve Albini, a female musician clearly based on Sin�ad O'Connor) and places (Sin-�, Central Saloon) in the Seattle music scene of this era. The costs of fame, especially addiction, are huge themes throughout the book, so it's unfortunate that the writing around addiction is grating. The pacing of the novel is also terrible--the improbable scavenger hunt in the late 1990s is overshadowed by the sections charting the Lightning Bottles' rise to and fall from fame, and multiple major would-be conflicts or revelations are summarized and resolved in mere paragraphs. Readers looking to indulge their nostalgia may find something worth discovering in these pages; anyone searching for quality prose should look elsewhere. A literary misfire soaked in 1990s musical nostalgia.
COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
September 1, 2024
Five years after the disappearance of her husband Elijah, Jane Pyre is one of the most hated women in music. Once, she and Elijah were in a successful band called The Lightning Bottles. Now, Jane has retreated from songwriting and fled to an isolated house in Germany to escape the limelight. However, an encounter with Hen, her teenage neighbor and dedicated Lightning Bottles fan, sends Jane on a road trip to find clues that make relive her relationship with Elijah, their rise to fame, and her fall into infamy. With Hen, Jane reckons with the truth about Elijah, including his alleged death, the clues they are following, and what this means for her future. Moving back and forth in time, Stapley deftly depicts Jane's coming-of-age as a musician and establishes her as a complex protagonist. The past sections are particularly vivid, depicting Jane and Elijah's sweet yet fraught love story and the toxicity of the music industry. With the backdrop of the 1990s Seattle grunge scene, Jane's story will appeal to fans of musicians like Courtney Love and Kathleen Hanna.
COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.