I wish I could rate this higher, many parts of it I thought were very beautiful and the thread of Patti and Robert's relationship was gorgeous and why I kept reading. However, the way this book is written and structured is predominantly repetitive and very quickly loses momentum. The choices of what to focus on and what not to were clearly entirely from her perspective and not at all considered by what an audience needs to understand to feel invited into this fascinating artistic moment in history. Somehow I'm still not sure how any of this happened, how she stumbled into this world or how this world really felt, how these chances rose, how these encounters happened, how it really feels to be privy to arguably the most impactful and groundbreaking decades of musical and artistic American history. I still feel stuck on the outside, knowing about as much about this world as if I were watching it from a birds-eye view. The prose, whilst in many places moving, became quickly redundant, and I cannot understand at all why it was structured in the way it was. More than anything, Smith talks predominantly about being an artist, and yet through the writing, unlike her music, I cannot feel what is actually inspiring her, what her desires and motivations really are. I am disappointed to find so many faults in this as a novel when the relationship it tells of and the world it is set in are so brilliant.

Why can’t I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply. I got over the loss of his desk and chair, but never the desire to produce a string of words more precious than the emeralds of Cortés. Yet I have a lock of his hair, a handful of his ashes, a box of his letters, a goatskin tambourine. And in the folds of faded violet tissue a necklace, two violet plaques etched in Arabic, strung with black and silver threads, given to me by the boy who loved Michelangelo.