Where she went (by Gayle Forman)

The cat started off by giving this book a solid 3 stars, but the more time passes, the more she just can’t see the point of this book. Where She Went is a sort of sequel to Forman’s much acclaimed If I Stay about a girl, Mia who’s in a terrible accident that kills her parents and her 8-year-old brother. Mia herself is in a coma where she has to decide whether she should stay and live, or not…  It’s been a while, but the cat remembers If I Stay as a powerful book dealing in a very credible way with grief and the threat of losing everything. Both Mia and Adam (her boyfriend) lived music. Mia was a classical cellist, Adam played in a rock band… two completely different social circles, but the music is what united them.

In Where She Went we meet Adam again 3 years after Mia left him. In those three years a lot has happened. Adam’s band Shooting Star has made it big time, but Adam doesn’t feel happy … all that fame and fortune, you know. He’s never gotten any sort of explanation why Mia left him, and despite having a gorgeous young actress as his girlfriend, it’s obvious he’s not over Mia. He has so many unanswered questions that it has left him depressed, self-destructive, lonely, unable to move forward. Surrounded by millions of fans, Adam feels alone, is mopey all day long, is on all sorts of anti-anxiety drugs, has fallen out with the other members of his band, picks fights with journalists, sleeps around with groupies…yet nothing works to get over the loneliness…  Where She Went sort of switches between a chance meeting right now between Adam and Mia in New York and flash backs of the three missing years. :::big sigh::::…200 pages of a character moping is a lot to take…

The cat can’t really see the point of this sequel, which is really just an oversized epilogue to If I Stay. It’s not like Mia is a big part of the book here. If anything she comes off as obnoxious and you get some sort of character assassination with the way she’s portrayed here. Where She Went is all about Adam and his inability to move on with his life, and that’s just sooooo incredibly tiresome! Emo complaint rock sadness black eyeliner tiresome. I wish I could say the writing itself redeems it all, but in a book where nothing really happens and where the characters have but one character trait, the writing has to be over the moon spectacular.  And the writing here? OK, but not good enough so that it can make me forget how whiney Adam really is! 2.5 stars max!

Virtuosity (by Jessica Martinez)

Carmen is 17 and one of the best violinists in the world. She’s already landed a Grammy and has a scholarship to Juilliard. She also has the privilege to play on a 1-million-dollar violin (!) – courtesy of her uppity grandparents – and now she’s ready to get into and win the prestigious Guarneri violin competition. Raised by a former opera singer, Carmen was destined to become a great musician. From a young age, her mom sheltered her, homeschooled her, overprotected her and basically molded her into this picture perfect violinist, the star she herself couldn’t be any more after a throat surgery ruined her voice. Now, with the Guarneri competition, Carmen’s talent gets matched by that of British prodigy Jeremy King. It doesn’t take much for Carmen to feel threatened by Jeremy. And yes, the two kids also feel an attraction…

Unfortunately, Virtuosity, though definitely not the worst book the cat’s read, is just so… bland, to be considered a thrilling read and anything more than ‘a filler read’. The romance between the two is sweet-ish , in that instant attraction sort of way (from feeling threatened and severe distrust to butterflies and kisses all in the span of an evening!). The ending felt very deus ex machina, like Martinez didn’t want either of her protagonists to lose out. There were also plenty of elements in the book that just didn’t work to be believable (the pills, what mom did to the competition).

Virtuosity is the book version of an X-Files MOTW-episode… Obviously there are no real monsters here, but it’s a bit of a filler in between really great books. For a book that’s supposedly all about the way something (in this case, music) makes you feel things (both Carmen and Jeremy liken their playing music to flying), the cat felt very little of that. Too plain, too obvious, too … mèh…

I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone (by Stephanie Kuehnert)

In a weird case of coincidence the cat watched the movie The Runaways, featuring Kristen Stewart & Dakota Fanning, on the same day as finishing Stephanie Kuehnert’s I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone. The Runaways is a biopic about the mid-1970s all-girl band of the same name. It shows a band haunted by and finally succumbing to the number one rock’n’roll cliché: drugs. It takes a whole lot to withstand the pressure of fame, more than what a couple of pre-punk teens have in them, apparently. Something that this movie and its characters have in common with the protagonists of Kuehnert’s debut novel – besides a love for music – is the less than stable family life they can turn to when things get tough.

Emily Black, the protagonists of I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone, has never known her mother. When she was only 4 months old, her mother Louisa, left her and her father “to follow the music”. That’s the story that Emily has always heard about her wild rock’n’roll mom. And in a weird almost reverse sort of psychology she has put her mother on a rock’n’roll pedestal and has tried to live up to the wild image she has of her. Ever since she could walk and talk, Emily has breathed music. With her best friend Regan and Regan’s boyfriend to be, Tom, she forms a band. Emily is all about the music, which is OK of course, but not always very believable, especially when she wants it to be about punk. This is the 90s in Wisconsin (and then Chicago), so at best, they could be grunge-knockoffs, but punk it ain’t. Granted, you get the same set of rock clichés as you get in The Runaways, and clichés are obviously rooted in truth or they wouldn’t be clichés in the first place, of course,…

Anyway, so, if you can get past all the punk and music clichés, then this book is just ace: raw-ish, sort of edgy and wannabe punk. The thing that bothered the cat, though (besides the fact that of course they make it huge so very easily, and yes, drugs do ruin this and yes, of course there’s an abusive stalker boyfriend), and which spoilt her reading experience in the second half of the book was the fact that Emily’s voice started off great (daughter with a mother-complex), but then turns into this whiny voice making all of it sound more like a music memoir, than about girl figuring out who she is.  There is also Louisa’s narrative interspersed throughout the book, but the problem is that the two threads don’t really come together. Mother and daughter do have one meeting at the end, but this book ends before the hard stuff really starts for both, especially for Louisa: picking up the pieces after she left her family. I just wanted more of the mother-daughter dynamic than the rock’n’roll cliché.

I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone suffers most from being a debut: too obvious at times (due to the narrator not being very subtle about the things she says), not detailed enough when it comes to actual reflection on the actions of the protagonists. To make a cliché story (and most ‘music stories’ are unfortunately fairly cliché) really stand out you need that edge that Emily Black and Stephanie Kuehnert aspire to. Too bad, because I think the heart of the writer may have been in the right place, it’s just the execution of it all that could have been crisper. But… the cat hasn’t given up on Stephanie Kuehnert yet!

Beige (by Cecil Castellucci)

The coolest thing about Cecil Castellucci’s books is that she makes everything so entirely readable. Before you know you’re caught up in the world of a character you don’t exactly like much – because she’s just utterly clueless and beige – yet end up appreciating anyway. Despite the fact that Beige has the LA punk scene as its main playfield, there’s little punk or edgy about Katy, or (to be completely honest) about the actual writing in this book. But do not be mistaken, just like with Boy Proof, this is the type of book you want to read when you’re a girl and about 13 or 14 and wondering whether  being uncool can be cool, or when you’re afraid that being yourself just isn’t good enough. Love the down-to-earthness of Castellucci!

Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan)

“This book was trash – complete and total trash, with the F-word making an appearance at least every other page and other profanities littered across the story I found it highly offensive and vulgar. I didn’t have to read much to realize what kind of book this would become, and needless to say, I did not finish this book. I cannot respect authors who degrade the name of literature by peppering their novels with filth and immorality.” (Comment by Snorkle as read on Goodreads and My Sentiments Exactly).

Before David Levithan collaborated with John Green to write the excellent Will Grayson, Will Grayson, he joined efforts with Rachel Cohn to write Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, the ideal wordtrack for an otherwise boring train ride. Be careful not to miss your stop, though, because this book is wittier than Juno on a good day and snarkier than Jessica at TWOP when she had to recap a season 9 ep of The X-Files. In other words: FUN!!