Wednesday, October 18, 2023

THE FINAL REVIVAL OF OPAL & NEV by Dawnie Walton

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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