Love is a Mix Tape is a love story, told tape by tape. Rob Sheffield is a music writer for Rolling Stone and various other music mags. He has interviewed various stars throughout his career... indeed Rob knows his music. This book chronicles Rob's life with Renee through the early 90's... his first real love and young wife. Renee added color, excitement, love and flavor to Rob's life. She was the lead singer while he played back up. They married young and shared a torrid affair with music. Several years after their marriage, however, Renee died suddenly and Rob found himself alone, clinging to musical memories and trying to make sense of their limited time together. Rob's poetic and trademark writing style illuminates his great passions for Renee and music with words that surprise you with humor and despair. I thought this book was brilliant and it made me more fully appreciate my own experiences of love for my husband and our shared passion for music. ( )

NOTE: Here be spoilers. If you don't want to know what happens in this book, you might not want to read this review.

"Unlike me, Renee was not shy; she was a real people-pleaser. She worried way too much what people thought of her, wore her heart on her sleeve, expected too much from people, and got hurt too easily. She kept other people's secrets like a champ, but told her own too fast. She expected the world not to cheat her and was always surprised when it did." ~excerpt from Love is a Mix Tape

After I finished reading Love is a Mix Tape, I totally wanted to make Rob Sheffield a mix tape. A real one, on one of the few remaining blank cassette tapes I've held onto. Each song would convey just how much I loved reading this book, how it made me laugh and cry and think and remember living through the 1990s.

The title of the book neatly sums up exactly what it's about: through the medium of music and mix tapes, Sheffield details the life he had with his wife Renee and what his life was like after her unexpected death.

As I read the book, I kept thinking about how I probably would have really gotten along with Renee. It was confirmed when I read of her deep love of the movie The Cutting Edge. "For Renee, this flick was liquid Vicodin. We watched it several thousand times. I can still recite the whole thing from memory." Liquid Vicodin! YES.

Each chapter begins with a label with track listings of a specific mix tape. I loved checking out the songs on the mixes; as someone not much younger than Sheffield, I grew up making mix tapes myself in the same era as he and Renee, and it was interesting to see what songs they chose, in what order they appeared on the tape, and why they were chosen.

In the same way in which he examines falling in love with Renee, what she was like and what their life together was like, Sheffield doesn't shy away from the intense reality of Renee's death; he describes what happened and how he reacted to it in detail, but it never gets too overwrought or clinical.

His writing style is enjoyable and sure. The book is about life and joy, loss and death, and while reading about this wonderful woman's tragically early death isn't easy, overall, the book is really wonderful.

The only thing I was kind of disappointed by was the ending. As I read about the aftermath of Renee's death, I wondered: will he be able to find love again? How will he be able to let someone into his life again after such an immense loss? What would this woman be like? He does find love again (he is now married again, actually), but after such detail about his life with Renee, he brushes lightly on their meeting and subsequent relationship. I don't know, maybe that was deliberate, to keep the focus on Renee, or because it didn't matter in the context of the book.

I also was curious to know how he came to write the book in the first place. How did he decide to write this book? What was it like, revisiting those memories deeply enough to write about them? That was never really talked about either. It's not a big deal, really, in light of how much I otherwise enjoyed the book, but it would have been cool.

I highly recommend this book, especially to anyone who lived through the 1990s, anyone who has loved someone, who has lost someone, who loves music and mix tapes and good writing. ( )

Rob Sheffield's Love is a Mix Tape is a memoir of the short span of time he spent with his wife Renee, before she passed away suddenly and unexpectedly from a pulmonary embolism. A music critic and contributing editor at Rolling Stone Magazine, Rob tells his story through a selection of 22 of the many mix tapes he and Renee made together and for each other during the decade of Nirvana. Sheffield builds a beautiful love story line-by-line and song-by-song, between a "shy, skinny, Irish Catholic geek from Boston" and a "real cool hell-raising Appalachian punk-rock girl."

I'm having a hard time with this review - nothing I am writing seems to do justice to the book. As a teen in the 90's, I was a girl of many mix tapes. I remember most of the music with a great deal of nostalgic fondness - even if I didn't appreciate certain songs at the time.

From Love is a Mix Tape: "There's a lot I miss about the nineties. It was an open, free time of possibilities, changes we thought were permanent. It seemed inconceivable that things would ever go back to the way they were in the eighties, when monsters were running the country and women were only allowed to play bass in indie-rock bands. The nineties moment has been stomped over so completely, it's hard to imagine it ever happened, much less lasted five, six, seven years. Remember Brittany Murphy, the funny, frizzy-haired, Mentos-loving dork in Clueless? By 2002, she was the hood ornament in 8 Mile, just another skinny starlet, an index of everything we've lost in that time."

Rob Sheffield is an amazing writer, deftly blending pop culture references into his story with each new page, leaving the reader breathlessly trying to keep up. His writing is fresh and witty, his journey of healing through music, extremely personal. I really enjoyed following the soundtrack of his life, and I'd like to share a few of the MANY excellent quotes that had me laughing-out-loud:

"Renee was my hero. Have you ever had a hero? Someone who says, I think it would be a good idea for you to steal a car and set it on fire then drive it off a cliff, and you say, Automatic or standard? That's what Renee was. A lion-hearted take-charge southern gal. It didn't take long for us to get all tangled up in each other's hair."

"I realize it's frowned on to choose a mate based on something superficial like the music they love. But superficiality has been good to me."

"We were looking forward to drawing up a prenuptial agreement, but unfortunately, we found out you can't get one unless you own something."

Read this book: if you've ever been in love. Read this book: if you've ever given or received a mix tape. Read this book: for fun and nostalgia or for a wonderful story of love and devotion. Just read this book. ( )

Nicely written novel about how music brings people together and how certain songs or albums will make you recall a certain person or time in your life. The part that almost had me in tears was when he explains how Sleater Kinney's "One More Hour" perfectly described the pain he was going through at one pinnacle moment in the novel. He also had a nostalgic description about how woman centered the early and mind 90's music and culture were and how it's sad that we probably won't see that for a while ""The nineties fad for indie rock overlapped precisely with the nineties fad for feminism. The idea of a pop culture that was pro-girl, or even just not anti-girl- that was a 1990s mainstream dream, rather than a 1980s or 2000s one, and it was real for a while. Music was not just part of it but leading the way- hard to believe, hard even to remember. But some of us do." I remember and miss those days. ( )

I really thought I would love this book, being the sentimental fool that I am, as well as a music fiend. Well, I was disappointed to find the book to be average at best. It was an easy read, but started to grow a little stale towards the end. ( )