The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton

 

I grabbed this because the idea of a novel about a protopunk band threatening a reunion seemed interesting to me. I wouldn't say there's nothing interesting in this, but I liked the novel a good deal less than I hoped. It's basically (mostly) the same story as any band that struggles and kinda makes it before the members come to kinda loathe each other. Also, the main story is the narrator (who's a fictional editor at a fictional music magazine working on a fictional book about the fictional band) working to forgive the Other Woman in her parents' marriage, and also probably her father, who died before she was born. It's plausible Ms. Walton knows this, but it's kinda buried under all the pseudo documentation. Because the text is mostly in the form of interviews (interspersed with the narrator's notes) the novel struggles of course to be kaleidoscopic rather than scrambled; it lands somewhere in the vast middle ground, there. The characters are reasonably clear, even if many of them are types someone with a knowledge of rock and pop history will recognize. The novel has things it wants to say about racism and sexism, both in culture overall and in the entertainment biz (at least the music division) and one of the reasons I was so disappointed was that I agree with those things, I just don't think the novel really did a good job of saying them--which probably connects to the fact I didn't think it did a great job of telling its story.