REVIEW: Guitar Girl
Aug. 17th, 2013 09:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllGuitar Girl: Sarra Manning. Speak 2003
Any book that makes me hum Kenickie's 'I Will Fix You' for days afterwards, as this did by referring to the band among other female-driven bands and artists in the dedication, is a good'un. After reading this, I’ll certainly keep an eye out for more of Manning’s books - I'd seen her rated on book blogs.
As an aside, this copy was published in the US, despite being about a teenage band from Stockport who apparently eat Jell-O, and yet the reference to Ant and Dec, whom Americans won’t know, remained.
This is a cautionary tale. In fact, our heroine says as much in the beginning - the conceit being that she’s looking back at the life and times of her band The Hormones. Be careful who you trust, especially in the music industry, but also with your heart. Of course, this book is about a decade old, when flashy phones were a novelty and the Internet was going to ruin the record industry. That the record industry was going to use and spit out a group of talented young people is isn’t a new lesson, the different and deliberate twist is that the band is driven by girls, especially singer-songwriter Molly, who was inspired by Riot Grrlesque Ruby X.
Molly and her friends Jane and Tara start a band while they're still at school to get some attention. Molly does have a vision of inspiring a generation of girl rockers with the songs that she writes about the life that she knows. Very quickly, two boys join them, and they get the attention of a suit from a label. Although 17 year-old Molly’s hippyish parents worry and insist she finishes her A-levels, she’s off to London with the band. However, it’s not so very glamorous, rather it’s a treadmill of gigging and doing things they don't want to do – and we know that it all ends badly.
There’s a nice ambivalence to Molly's relationship with Dean – she’s very slow to see what his ability to get under her skin means, there are all the growing intraband tensions that are building up to an explosion when they try to break America and Molly’s relationship with her parents, who even she knows are well-meaning, is fractious. It is noted that Molly has been physically slow in developing and she’s constantly nagged for writing 'childish' lyrics. There’s a horrifying, prurient interview that’s obsessed with her virginity that ought to read like parody. While I liked that Manning made it okay that Molly was growing up at her own pace, even to me, she seemed closer to being four years younger than her actual age, and I thought she was barely ready to be let out to go to university, let alone a career in a rock band. Her claims to her parents that she's ready to be a mature, independent young woman are undercut by her stroppiness. Her naivety makes her very vulnerable.
I felt the book was caught a little between trying to be realistic and being a good story – it's readable and often amusing, but Manning could have given even more depth and, well, texture, for nstance Molly's relationship with Jane and her icon Ruby X could have been developed more, and would have earned some of what happens towards the end a little more.
Still, it leaves the interesting question of whither the female rockers? I know young women are all over (Anglo-American) pop in its various forms and have been since this book was published, but very few are rocking out.
Any book that makes me hum Kenickie's 'I Will Fix You' for days afterwards, as this did by referring to the band among other female-driven bands and artists in the dedication, is a good'un. After reading this, I’ll certainly keep an eye out for more of Manning’s books - I'd seen her rated on book blogs.
As an aside, this copy was published in the US, despite being about a teenage band from Stockport who apparently eat Jell-O, and yet the reference to Ant and Dec, whom Americans won’t know, remained.
This is a cautionary tale. In fact, our heroine says as much in the beginning - the conceit being that she’s looking back at the life and times of her band The Hormones. Be careful who you trust, especially in the music industry, but also with your heart. Of course, this book is about a decade old, when flashy phones were a novelty and the Internet was going to ruin the record industry. That the record industry was going to use and spit out a group of talented young people is isn’t a new lesson, the different and deliberate twist is that the band is driven by girls, especially singer-songwriter Molly, who was inspired by Riot Grrlesque Ruby X.
Molly and her friends Jane and Tara start a band while they're still at school to get some attention. Molly does have a vision of inspiring a generation of girl rockers with the songs that she writes about the life that she knows. Very quickly, two boys join them, and they get the attention of a suit from a label. Although 17 year-old Molly’s hippyish parents worry and insist she finishes her A-levels, she’s off to London with the band. However, it’s not so very glamorous, rather it’s a treadmill of gigging and doing things they don't want to do – and we know that it all ends badly.
There’s a nice ambivalence to Molly's relationship with Dean – she’s very slow to see what his ability to get under her skin means, there are all the growing intraband tensions that are building up to an explosion when they try to break America and Molly’s relationship with her parents, who even she knows are well-meaning, is fractious. It is noted that Molly has been physically slow in developing and she’s constantly nagged for writing 'childish' lyrics. There’s a horrifying, prurient interview that’s obsessed with her virginity that ought to read like parody. While I liked that Manning made it okay that Molly was growing up at her own pace, even to me, she seemed closer to being four years younger than her actual age, and I thought she was barely ready to be let out to go to university, let alone a career in a rock band. Her claims to her parents that she's ready to be a mature, independent young woman are undercut by her stroppiness. Her naivety makes her very vulnerable.
I felt the book was caught a little between trying to be realistic and being a good story – it's readable and often amusing, but Manning could have given even more depth and, well, texture, for nstance Molly's relationship with Jane and her icon Ruby X could have been developed more, and would have earned some of what happens towards the end a little more.
Still, it leaves the interesting question of whither the female rockers? I know young women are all over (Anglo-American) pop in its various forms and have been since this book was published, but very few are rocking out.
