Tagged with musicians
I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone
reviewdate:
Sep 27 2015
isn:
9781416562696
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First Spring Grass Fire
Spoon's book is listed as a novel but reads like a memoir, told in nonlinear episodes with the protagonist sharing the author's name. I suppose I shouldn't care about the distinction, but I can't help wanting to know what I'm reading. Regardless, one should treasure the rare opportunity to read about the real or fictionalized life of a genderqueer child growing up in a religious family in the Canadian prairies.
reviewdate:
May 5 2013
isn:
978-1-55152-480-1
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Mockingbirds, the
I almost put The Mockingbirds down after the first clumsy page or two, but I stuck with it, and am glad I did. It's the story of date rape and students taking the law into their own hands because the school administration is too impressed with itself to acknowledge and address the school's imperfections. The rapist is a water polo player, for dog's sake!
reviewdate:
Feb 8 2012
isn:
978-0-316-09053-7
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Queen of Shadows
I found this because someone posted or referenced the author’s great Ten Rules for Fat Girls, and I saw on her site that she writes vampire novels. Protagonist Miranda Grey isn’t fat, but when she’s thin its viewed as a sign of poor physical and mental health.
reviewdate:
Sep 30 2011
isn:
978-0-441-01925-0
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Grrrl
Marlie, a Toronto teen, starts keeping a journal in August 1990 and keeps it up through October 1992. In that time she obsesses over the the Pretenders, learns to play guitar, discovers riot grrrl, starts a band, makes and loses friends, falls in love with a girl, falls in love with a boy, sees a lot of shows, and basically embraces and releases her inner fierceness.
reviewdate:
Apr 21 2011
isn:
0-9753964-4-7
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Girls to the Front: the True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution
A history of the hey day of riot grrrl, Girls to the Front reads more like a biography of the movement, like a biography of an ex-lover on whom the author has some distance but still identifies with to a large extent. It is a loving, but not uncritical portrait of the rise of riot grrrl and its best known players. A professional (and very talented) writer, Sara Marcus includes herself only in the introduction and briefly in the epilogue. Given my own bias toward personal narratives and the every grrrl, I might have liked a little more about Sara's experiences and adventures, but I still found the book to be educational, inspiring, compelling, and enraging--in a good way.
reviewdate:
Dec 19 2010
isn:
978-0-06-180636-0
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Soul Brothers and Sister Lou, the
I'm having a hard time writing this review because I love the book so much. I've read it a bunch of times (five? ten?) since I first encountered it as a child. It's about a 14-year-old African-American girl coming up in a poor neighborhood of an unnamed northern city. She wants to feel like part of something, and gets her chance when she wrangles a former storefront church with an old piano in it into a clubhouse for her and the kids who previously had to hang out on the street, dodging a vindictive cop named Lafferty.
reviewdate:
Oct 31 2010
isn:
0-7043-4900-0
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Just Kids
Patti Smith's adventures with Robert Mapplethorpe and lots of the happening artists and musicians of the late 60s/early 70s--pretty neat to be inside her head like that.
Quotations:
The Chelsea was like a doll's house in the Twilight Zone, with a hundred rooms, each a small universe. I wandered the halls seeking its spirits, dead or alive. My adventures were mildly mischievous, tapping open a door slightly ajar and getting a glimpse of Virgil Thomson's grand piano, or loitering before the nameplate of Arthur C. Clarke, hoping he might suddenly emerge. Occasionally I would bump into Gert Schiff, the German scholar, armed with volumes of Picasso, or Viva in Eau Sauvage. Everyone had something to offer and nobody appeared to have any money. Even the successful seemed to have just enough to live like extravagant bums. p.112
reviewdate:
Aug 23 2010
isn:
978-0-06-621131-2
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Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo
I've read this novel about three artist sisters from South Carolina at least twice before. The first time I absolutely loved it, and the second time I was a little cooler. This time--probably 15 years after the last reading--I was in some ways reading a whole different book. Being in my teens and twenties for the first two readings, I was focused entirely on weaver Sassafrass, musician Indigo, and especially dancer Cypress. Now that I'm probably closer to mama Hilda Effania's age, I found her to be the most intriguing character.
reviewdate:
May 20 2010
isn:
0-312-14091-6