Kiara Brinkman

Pretty easy-going pace and tone. This feels like a music-based (with focus on British rock) slice of life. The time period is a little hard to place, but it feels like it’s early 2000’s. Facebook’s a thing, the main character has a flip phone and one of the early iPods, and a music store is still in business yet Candy Crush (2012) exists. All of that adds to the retro vibes and the dry, quirky humor.

I think the author got preteen struggles and frustrations well. This book won’t appeal to everyone mostly due to its slow, casual storytelling, the Beatles spotlight, and understandably the cancer plotline with Lucy’s grandma.

Overall, I liked this. I also liked the art style it gave the story personality.

3.5… (more)

This is an unusual book about an unusual boy. This story's narrator is young Sebby Lane, who is trying to make sense of life in his crisis-striken family. A number of reviewers / blurbers describe Sebby as autistic. The book itself never labels him thus. He does clearly have many characteristics of the Autism Spectrum, though he also expresses some thoughts that would be very uncharacteristic of someone on the spectrum. Of course, it's a spectrum -- nobody has all the possible traits.

I found myself drawn into Sebby's story through his eyes which see the world in a unique way. This is a quick read. While the book weighs in at over 300 pages, many of the pages are not full. Sebby tells his story in bits and pieces, so there is a lot of "white space" on many of the pages. Sebby's voice takes some getting used to, but by the end of the book I felt like I knew him -- and he seemed one of the most "normal" people in the book. Some aspects of the family situation seemed a little implausible at times, but the story worked.

A thought-provoking story.… (more)