YA contemporary. Traces the experiences of two young women (and their respective best friends) at a massive music festival, and their trajectory from strangers to much more. Sweet and funny, and it certainly provides the kind of emotional journey that one reads this sort of book to have, so I’m sure it will have many devoted readers. But in this case, the execution felt somewhat contrived to me. Some of that, I think, was about having to move the characters through all of this intensity over only two or three days, which involved not only the relational developments between them but the resolution of some major life stuff beyond that for each of them. Some of it was about the romanticization of the scene and the setting – i.e. live music as a general phenomenon and enormous music festivals in particular. To be fair, I’m not a great audience for that, as someone who is indifferent to live music (sorry, musicians!) and who would absolutely hate attending that sort of large event, but I think even if I was more receptive I would still be at best ambivalent about the way they are built up in this book. Then there are the respective traumas in the two main characters’ lives and how they are constantly referenced but the specifics kept from the readers for so much of the book. I think it actually worked okay for one of them, but decidedly not for the other, where not giving the details on the page was a distracting intrusion of author-logic with no basis in character-logic. Anyway, I could list other things that contributed to this sense of contrivedness, but I don’t want to belabour it. I was still rooting for the two of them and I still got enjoyment out of their journey.
Originally posted by Scott on Goodreads.