This book is about the lives of two people; Sasha and
Bennie. Bennie is a music producer and Sasha is his assistant. There are twelve
chapters in the book and each one is told from a different person’s point of
view. Each person has a connection to either Sasha or Bennie. Sasha is pretty
much the main character but some of the narrators only know Bennie and have
just met Sasha in passing. As if having each chapter being told to you by
different people weren’t complicated enough, the timeline also jumps around a
lot. This means once you start a chapter you need to work out who is telling
it, how they relate to Sasha or Bennie and at what point in their lives they
know them.
A lot of the characters recur in the narrations and so we
glimpse their lives as they change too. Sasha was a wild child, hanging out
with bands and running away when she was younger. She then gets her life
together and goes to college and becomes Bennie’s assistant. She then
reconnects with a boyfriend from college whom she marries and has two children
with. Her life is obviously not a boring one and would have been a perfectly
good story without all the jumping around on the timeline. I like her as a
character, she’s independent and strong. Although she doesn’t have a
conventional upbringing she calms down and has a family of her own. She’s not
completely happy with her life but it’s enough.
Bennie used to be a bassist in a band. It wasn’t a very
successful band and he wasn’t the greatest bassist but it led to him becoming a
record producer and owning his own label. He acquires Sasha as his assistant
who runs everything for him and makes sure he’s in the right place at the right
time. He has been married and has a son from that relationship. He doesn’t see
his son a lot and their relationship is an awkward one. He is contacted by an
old bandmate who hasn’t been as lucky as Bennie. In the future Bennie has a new
assistant, a new wife and child, and is preparing for a concert for his old
bandmate. Bennie is your average flawed character and not really that
interesting.
There is another character that links a lot of the
characters together. Lou is a hippy who picks up a hitch-hiking girl. The girl
is in a band with Bennie. Lou gets Bennie to the position he does as Lou is
also a record producer and takes Bennie under his wing. Lou has various
children from various relationships and the only time he slows down is on his
death bed. At the end of the book all the characters have a connection to each
other. This does bring everything together nicely but you do need to remember
who characters are and how they’re related which can be tricky.
The book was well written and I read it all the way through
but I didn’t really like it. It was too confusing when the story was already
complicated enough. It’s trying to be too clever when it really doesn’t need
to. The chapter from Sasha’s daughter was interesting because that was told in
slides. The other characters’ narrations weren’t always easy to follow as there
weren’t always speech marks so you had to check to see which parts were being
spoken. I can see that this is a good book for book groups as it would
definitely bring mixed thoughts to the table. I’m not sure how much I’d be up
for reading more of her books. I think I’d have to flick through it first and
see what sort of story it was. She’s a good writer and doesn’t need to try and
be clever. It’s just confusing. It’s an interesting idea but didn’t quite work
for me.
Overall rating 3 out of 5.
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