Rock On
by Denise Vega
Hardcover, 296 pg.
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2012
I can’t remember what it was that made goodreads suggest this book to me, but I put it on my To Read list over a year and a half ago, and really only picked it up because it was front-faced on a library shelf I walked by last week, and my stack was pretty light. Glad I did pick it up though.
I’ve got a soft-spot for rock band novels — ever since The Buffalo Nickel Blues Band, which I read about 400 times in junior high. The Commitments (one of my all-time favorites), Eddie and the Cruisers, Juliet, Naked and a handful of others I can’t recall at the moment. There’s something about the raw emotion that the music taps into that just grabs you, makes a solid connection between the characters and the reader.
This is more than that (as the subtitle informs). Primarily, we’ve got the story of a high school band on their way to the High School Battle of the Bands. But that’s not the emotional core of the novel, it’s just the framework to hang the rest of the stories on.
Sure, Ori’s a great guitarist — practically too good to believe (but hey, it’s fiction, relax). But when it comes to girls? Fuhgeddaboudit. Nervous, anxious, trembling, not-at-all-confident — pick your synonym, and that’s him. As he and his band start gaining a little notoriety in the area, he’s finding himself receiving a bit more female attention (which is both great and mortifying for him). There’s one girl in particular . . . well, read it yourself. It’s a sweet story, well told. Nothing that’ll rock your world, but it’s nice.
But even that’s not the core of the novel — the fractured relationship between Ori and his older brother/former idol Del is where this book lives (or at least wants to). It takes time to get the full story, but Del goes from being the Top Dog in high school to a former jock/college drop-out during his first semester, he moves home and things between the brothers deteriorate quickly. Without this the rest of the book would barely be worth reading (as much as I liked it), watching Ori struggle to find the brother he worshiped in this current version, Del struggle with his current reality, and the brothers struggle to be civil — that’s the ultimate story being told here. And as well-done as it is — the emotions are right (on both sides), it’s utterly believable and relatable — but there’s something missing. I wish I knew what it was, but it’s just not as good as it wants to be.
I don’t want to overlook some of the other supporting characters — Ori’s little sister, his next-door neighbor/friend/band webmistress, and the eventual bass player are well-drawn, and I’ve been glad to spend more time with one/all of them — the bassist in particular.
A nice touch to this is in between some chapters, Vega provides logs from the band’s blog on a local music site — the blog posts themselves, mostly reiterate what we already know, but the comment threads? A lot of fun to read — and nice way to get a different perspective on events than Vega’s characters or the readers have.
A fun, quick read, emotionally satisfying, and almost as good as it tries to be — a pleasant way to while away a couple of hours.
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