What a wonderful look back at the life of Mac Miller. I really was sucked into the book, reading about his hardships and what made him uniquely himself. Thank you NetGalley, and the Publisher, for the unique opportunity to read this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

This book was hit and miss for me. The tone seemed to oscillate between vernacular and academic, which proved a bit disorienting for me. The info seemed legit, but some peripheral characters were given a voice that seemed to far outweigh their knowledge and/or intimacy with Miller.

ARC provided

Interesting and well written I just personally couldn’t get into the story. Definitely creepy. Just a little slow and unbelievable at some points. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Loved the cover and would have loved to know more about Mac's life. Unfortunately, I couldn't get passed the fact that this book was written without his family's consent so I DNF'd it at about 10%.

I didn't initially realize that this book was written without the family's consent. I'm not sure if that's why the book felt so disjointed, but it felt very thrown together. There didn't seem to be a lot of substance to the book, and the writing didn't pull me in. There really wasn't much here that I didn't already know.

First, I have to acknowledge the elephant in the room. This book was written without the consent of the family and friends of Mac Miller himself. Due to this, a lot of the book feels inauthentic and pieced together. It follows a very haphazard timeline of Miller's life based on other people's work: interviews, journals, TV appearance, etc. It reads like a research paper of collected pieces than a coherent recollection of his life. Had I had known this prior to requesting, I would have passed.

This book is a money-grab. It feels as if there wasn't enough to fill the prompt, so Cantor added in things that loosely fit the bill to create "substance." This is not something I would recommend, keep, or promote; it's poorly written and lacks credibility. As a reader and a fan, I'm disappointed. You expect a level of clarity and depth when it comes to reading biographies. You expect to dive into the life of the person. You want to see new things about them and learn about who they are. This didn't provide any of that. Anyone who had an interest in Mac Miller's life would know a lot of this already. Take Mac out of the story and it's an interesting look at the history of hip hop, but this is not in honor of Mac Miller.

With that out of the way, this text was so poorly written that I barely made it through, eventually stopping at 67%. Being that the author had no relationship with Miller, a lot of what was discussed was on the surface. What is shared about him is vague or broad, repeating a lot of the comments made about Miller and his career. And the repetitiveness didn't stop there, the themes and ideas covered were super repetitive: where he grew up, he was white, the different influences. I didn't actually feel like I learned anything about Mac Miller as a person, instead just as an icon from far away. Part of what played into this was the inability to just tell his story.

The opening to this book was one of the first places it lost me. Instead of inviting us into Mac Miller's world, we were given a history lesson on Pittsburgh and the subsection that he grew up in. While this could have been interesting, it was long and created a disconnect by bringing us way back in American history. It slowly makes its way into his parents' lives and how they started their family, but again, it was a basic recitation of general information. Knowing that his family was not involved made this part hard to read too because you knew that information was just pieced together, not shared directly.

SO much of this book is building the history of hip hop in America, more specifically the North East/Pittsburgh. I know more about Wiz. Eminem, and Vanilla Ice than I ever needed to know from this book. While those three feel relevant to Miller's story (Wiz being a friend in Pittsburgh, Eminem and Ice both being white), all of the rest is just overwhelming. I was reading pages upon pages about the discovery and rise of SO MANY rappers, often with no connection at all to Miller and most well before his time. I understand setting the scene, but it feels like filler information to try to create an ambiance that just wasn't there. I liked hearing stories of local rappers and the direct scene he grew up in, but the rest was unnecessary.

There was too much of a focus on him being white too. While I understand the stigma this placed on his career and the difficulty it presented in entering the rap realm, we all knew this. We know he's white and that it wasn't easy when he is only being compared to Em and Ice. This could have had it's own chapter, talked about the evolution of being white in hip hop, and left it at that. Instead, it came up often and repetitively. Even with the sporadic inclusion of other white rappers (especially the Beastie Boys), it felt like a cop-out to add in more fluff. None of these careers mirrored or modeled each other: each rapper was completely unique to the other with diverse backgrounds and different musical focuses and influences.

All of these distractions made it hard to follow. I often couldn't remember how old Miller should be at one point or another because there was no linear path for this book to take. Trying to piece together someone's life through other people's journalism presents a problem with coherency. It was evident here. Parts of it were such media clichés too. Going through mixtape and albums track by track, sharing what each song is about? Really? A simple Google search will produce those answers.

The only good thing was the little information I took away once we reached KIDS about 40% of the way in. It was fun to see his drive and determination and to read the repurposed quotes from childhood and teenaged friends, but none of it spoke to anything Miller hasn't said before. It was hard to decipher Miller's true standing on some points though because it was pieced together. I'm not sure I could clearly identify his influences or directions just from having read this book. So when a few golden nuggets slipped through, I appreciated it.

While the last 33% could provide some new discovery for me, I'll never know. I read more than I wanted to and made sure that my assertions were consistent before jumping ship. This one star rating truly reflects my feelings towards this biography. Thank you to Abrams Press and NetGalley for the advanced copy.