This was such a fun country music, coming of age adventure that kept a smile on my face the entire time.

The book kept a good pace and didn’t feel to drawn out or have many distractions in it. I enjoyed the dueling timelines and the parallels between Decklee & Darren.

While there were no surprises in this book and I could figure out the “mystery” the whole time, it still kept me engaged. I loved the subtle queer narratives especially as it relates to country music and how people have had to live in the shadows.

This book left me wanting a soundtrack from Mickenlee.

This book was a fun romp that I just ate up, but it didn’t quite hit five stars for me. First off the pros, I love some messy morally gray lesbians and Decklee scratched that itch for me. Her romance felt so raw and real that I kept wanting every chapter to be in her perspective. Not to mention I adore the 60s/70s as a setting for a story because of its grimy glamour. Decklee is definitely this books standout, however, Darren is also a wonderful character. I think that I related less to her struggles since I’m an adult but I think her story will resonate with a lot of teens. Getting to watch her go full investigative reporter was such a silly good time.

I think what kept this book from being perfect for me is that I kept comparing it to two of my favorite reads, I Kissed Shara Wheeler and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. Shara better executes the theme of learning to love small southern towns. While Evelyn Hugo better explores the ways in which women exploit and are exploited by fame. As a read I just kept wishing we delved more into Decklee because she’s the most compelling character in the whole book. It felt like I only got a glimpse of her psyche. This also is no fault of the book but I really struggled to get through this because of the formatting on kindle. There would often be random large paragraph breaks or huge spaces between parts of words. I’m assuming that this happened because of a format conversion. Hopefully Viking fixes this issue for future ARCs.

Thanks to Viking Books for Young Readers for providing me with a free e-ARC in exchange for my honest review.

3.5

I enjoyed this but something was definitely missing, and that something was romantic chemistry between Kendall and Darren. It felt like we were told they were falling in love more than actually being shown that. To me it seemed really forced and I think it would’ve been a better story without that romance/for it to have been written better than it was.

But yay for kind of evil gay Dolly Parton!

4.5 stars