I did not like the format of this book, which is a series of
interviews conducted by Sunny Shelton, the editor-in-chief of a music-oriented
publication. I sometimes lost track of
who was speaking and had to flip back, and the timeline was meandering. Sunny’s comments had a different font, making
them easy to distinguish, but I did not like the hopping around from one
speaker to another. Enough about
that. The storyline, if you want to call
it that, involves a rock duo—a red-haired Englishman (Nev) and a Black woman
from Detroit (Opal). An Altamont-style
disaster is the focal point of the whole novel and plays a role in the
undulating relationship between the two main characters. Both are guilty of lapses in judgment on that
fateful day, but it’s hard to fault either one of them, since they couldn’t
know what the tragic result would be.
Opal is definitely the character who gets the most air time and has the
better moral compass, but her colorful fashionista friend Virgil was my
favorite, and I would have liked to have heard more from him. Nev, on the other hand, gets credit for
snatching Opal out of oblivion and into the limelight, but after that, he’s not
much more than an ambitious songwriter and guitar player. As the daughter of Opal and Nev’s former
drummer, Sunny’s personal connection is both a boon and a detriment to getting
their story right. When she receives a
piece of information that may or may not be true, her plans for a book about
Opal and Nev start to unravel, as does her relationship with them.
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