The writing had a lush and dreamy quality to it that I really enjoyed. The characters an plot, however, felt lacking. I will be looking out for Warrell's next book, however. There's some real potential here.

I loved this book and found it impossible to put it down. From the very beginning, you are drawn into the lives of captivating women vying for the attention of Circus, an aging musician whose narcissism leaves a trail of broken relationships in his pursuit of fame. However, this engaging and uplifting narrative transcends mere romance and heartbreak.

The story amplifies the voices of the women surrounding Circus, presenting a rich and diverse array of characters that resonate with aspects of ourselves or those we know, all navigating the quest for the love they crave. These characters linger in your thoughts long after you’ve turned the final page. The author’s skillful use of dialogue immerses you in the emotional depths of each relationship, unveiling the intricate needs of each richly developed character. This book is truly one-of-a-kind and profoundly moving.

Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm. Pub Date: September 27, 2022. Rating: 2 stars. At the heart of this novel is the story of Circus, a jazz musician. He is a complex man, has many layers and this novel explores his relationship with his daughter, relationships with multiple women as well as his relationship to music and how to stay relevant as a musician. It was difficult to pinpoint what exactly the storyline of this novel was because of all the dynamics and layers with multiple characters. I think the most enjoyable aspect of this novel was the jazz references. I found it hard to actually have empathy for Circus throughout the novel and could not connect with him. Thanks to #netgalley and #knopfdoubledaypublishing for this e-arc in exchange for my honest review.

I couldn’t connect with this book. Circus Palmer is a womanizer and a terrible father. Maybe the book hit too close to home for me. I had the same type of father. However, my mother was fantastic nothing like Koko’s mother. At 50%, it became a dnf. Ranking it a 3, because anything less would be unfair since I didn’t finish.

Sweet Soft and Plenty Rhythm is follows the life of jazz musician Circus Palmer through the eyes of the women in his life. He's a womanizer and an absent dad to a teenager, Koko, who also is a protagonist. Overall I enjoyed the different POVs and felt that they were well-written. Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the ARC.

The story of Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm weaves in and out among the women in the life of Circus Palmer, a jazz musician who might not be a bad man, but can’t be called a good man, either. Perhaps the best way to describe him is careless. Careless with love, affection, sex, emotion. But by focusing on the women in his life, this book becomes a beautiful, tragic, hopeful, emotional journey that I’m glad I took.

I had a hard time finding something to connect to with this book. A man named Circus who's a terrible partner and an even worse father just wasn't very appealing, but he was a good musician. It's an interesting story for the point of view of the women around this Circus character, but not a story that moved me.

Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm by Laura Warrell is a literary fiction novel that introduces us to a womanizing jazz musician and the females who cross his path, including his daughter. 

It’s 2013, and Circus Palmer is a 40-year-old trumpet player who takes gigs across the country but doesn’t like to plant roots anywhere. In the first few pages, he learns that Maggie, the woman who enthralls him, is pregnant. He tries to convince her to end the pregnancy; he can’t be rooted down to anything. And she shouldn’t root herself down since she’s a drummer. A child can’t fit into their musician-touring life. Maggie says she wants the baby, and she returns to drumming while Circus heads home to Boston. We meet his 14-year-old daughter Koko who’s trying to navigate high school and control her fluctuating hormones. With Circus back in the picture, Koko still harbors the emptiness she felt for years living without him and living with her regretful, depressed  mother, Circus’ ex-wife Pia.

While Koko and Pia are constants in Circus’ life, the jazzman finds himself constantly attracted to other women. He falls for a twenty-something waitress at a bar where he plays for gigs, for a mysterious woman on the train, for a woman who will do anything for him when he visits her in nearby Providence, Rhode Island. He comes across a woman he wanted to marry years ago while he witnesses the decline of the woman he did marry by the weight of taking care of their daughter and desiring love from him. All these women still don’t make up for losing Maggie and the child she may be carrying. As he wonders about that child, he realizes the need to focus on Koko as his daughter falls for boys who remind him of himself. Though his dream of recording an album still lingers in the background, his womanizing cripples his ability to assume the fame he swears he can taste. 

Unpeeling the layers of the womanizer and the women hurt by the actions make for an absorbing story. It switches between perspectives with the trail of women Circus leaves in his wake. Even meeting the women who spend one night with him show how his carelessness can feel magnitudinous to the women he hurts. Koko detects the pain he is causing other women because her mother lives with the pain on a deeper level. So, the added thread of a teenage daughter hungry for love seeing her father also hungry for love gives the story more depth. And Circus, of course, doesn’t put two and two together about how his actions affect Koko or his career. He thinks his womanizing helps him stay away as a father in case he messes up parenthood and helps him stay creative with his music when a muse disappears. Yet, the dependence on women derails his future, as he lives in a pattern of unfulfilled opportunities.

Overall, the book introduces characters who are intriguing as they sift through their emotions after welcoming Circus or re-welcoming him into their lives. Watching the characters come into their feelings on the pages make the story memorable as if you know the characters. The smoothness of the details about their everyday lives also hops off the page.

First time novelist Laura Warrell’s writing in Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm is superb, but the characters are not. Ms. Warrell’s writing style is engrossing, languishly drifting among characters and events like the melodic music that drives the protagonist forward in life; but the characters, and particularly the main character, aren’t very likable, don’t make good life choices, and don’t have much to commend them. The best that can be said about the main character, a jazz trumpet player, is that he’s honest about his shortcomings and lack of commitment and fidelity, and all the women who love him and expect him to be someone other than who he tells them he is are just downright stupid. Unfortunately, in his youth he thought he could be a regular, family-type man and settle down and have a family, so he made the mistake of getting married and bringing a child into the world. The one made to suffer consequences through no fault of her own, of course, is the innocent child.

In middle age the protagonist learns he is to become a father for the second time, and he does not respond well to the news. That the characters eventually come together and form a semblance of family is a remarkable achievement.

I want to thank Laura Warrell, her publisher Vintage, and NetGalley for providing me an advanced digital copy of Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm to read and allowing me to provide this voluntary review. I’m very interested to see where Ms. Warrell goes next with her writing.

this is less a novel than a series of short stories about a jazz musician & the women around him.

the writing is sad & lovely but it was difficult to embrace characters that make such terrible choices.

Really slow to start but an okay read. Cared much more about the women than the man, he seemed to not want to grow or change at all. I would’ve preferred one of the women as the main characters.

This was a beautiful jazz-filled story that really enveloped me with the sights and sounds throughout. I tend to enjoy faster-paced books though so it took me a long time to get through it, picking the book up and putting it down over months. So, while it’s not binge-worthy, it’s worthy. There are some important lessons here about love, loss and what’s really important in life. It does feel TV-adaptation worthy so I’m waiting to see that happen?

A jazz man out of time and the impact of his philandering. From the description, it would seem that this would focus on the life of Chazz Palmer. A jazz man, a cheater, and a fast talker. The book begins this way as he skips out on another woman. The perspective changes quickly. Instead, we see the women that he has impacted. The women he has cheated on. The women he only sees when he is in town. His daughter, whom he never sees.

I enjoyed the perspective; it was a clever way to tell this story. Most of the women, even his daughter, seem to grow in character development over time. It would seem that nothing would ever catch up to Palmer, but a calamity at the end really puts him in his place and humbles him. It is a really satisfying story of perseverance.

Thank you so much to the publisher for sending me an ARC!
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Unfortunately I DNFed this, it just didn’t catch my attention and maybe I’ll get into it again when I’m in the perfect headspace to give this another try! But I would buy and recommend this for this definitely!

I expected more out of this story. There is nothing wrong with the writing, but overall I didn't love the story. It was good enough.

This wasn't my jam. It was well written and filled with so much passion, but once I hated Circus, I couldn't stop hating Circus as the pages went on. After how thrilling the beginning of the book felt, I was disappointed at how it all turned out.

https://www.howjenexists.com/recent-reads/sweet-soft-plenty-rhythm

This was such a beautiful novel and exactly the type of book I love. We follow Circus Palmer, a trumpet player and a woman player as well. We follow the women in his life including girlfriends, friends with benefits, his ex-wife and his daughter and explore all the ways he’s affected their life. Quiet and heart wrenching and beautifully written, I’ll certainly be recommending this one!

Honestly, I don't know what to make of this one. The prose of this debut is absolutely stunning, possibly the best prose I've read in the past year or so.

However, the plot was jumbled and at times read more like a collection of short stories rather than a cohesive work of literary fiction. I'm left trying to figure out if Warrell successfully completed her goal here as I'm not sure what it was to begin with? Redemption arc for Circus? A character study on Circus and the various women in his life?

If it's either of those, I'd say its partially successful, but as it was not cohesive it is hard to decide.

If I was rating this on prose and the most of plot alone, I would probably give it a 3.7-3.75 stars. While it's obvious no one in this story is supposed to be likable, there was a glaring issue with on plot point that readers should not forgive or forget.

Let's talk about the romanticizing and the idolization of one of the Boston Marathon Bombers by teenage girls.

One, it's problematic - people died and people's lives were changed forever. Two, it was unnecessary as the plot could've been moved along in a similar fashion without this monstrosity.

This glaring issue is why I'll be rating it 2.75 stars.

Worrell's debut held a lot of promise with the amazing prose and the synopsis, but it was not successful in being a cohesive novel.

Real Rating: 2.5* of five, rounded up because god help me it's so readable

It depresses me to say this, but this book was...despite truly, deeply impressive writing...
<blockquote>The girl may have been the end for him.

That the wind shifted and sent a chill across her freshly cleaned skin so that she sensed her own solitude in a way that no longer frightened her as she walked bare and unhindered toward what was new.</blockquote>
...lovely and fully sensory-universe-planted but, and this is the crux of the matter for me, it's about a man.

A group of women have different relationships with one man.

Ground-breaking stuff, no? Never read anything like it before! Except about half the Western canon. Women circle Circus, whose name suggested to me clownishness that I found ample evidence for. They *keep* circling Circus no matter what. And, folks, if there ever was a man whose actions and inactions invalidated his Manhood Card℠, it's Circus. He never met a responsibility he didn't shirk.

But his Art! is usually the rallying cry I hear. His art my lily-white one. He's a bog-standard self-absorbed arrested adolescent, probably a libertarian and a religious nut although those are my own interpolations, with a good line of patter and some skills in sexual gratification.

He is, bluntly, the kind of person I look down on and the kind of character I am deeply sickened to see recrudescing on best-of lists and getting all sorts of happy talk said about it. He's a serial cheater, an emotional abuser, and an unworthy object of our cultural attention because his brothers are teeming like maggots on a shit-pile, exuding their spurious shine that so many seem to see as attractive when it's actually the slime they secrete to slip out of any kind or sort of commitment that inconveniences, annoys, or bores them.

Yuck.

After jazz trombonist, Circus Palmer, turns 40, all his chickens, in the form of women from his past and present, come home to roost. Like a jazz piece, there are some major themes - Circus and his teen daughter Koko - and then different women step up to take a solo in a series of vignettes that weave back into the main narrative.

Though a skilled musician, Circus has never, and will never, make the big time. He’s still playing mid level gigs at bars and a sushi restaurant (but it’s a “classy joint”) and a record company executive dismisses him as “not interesting.” He teaches at Berklee but his more talented students clearly feel like he has nothing they can learn from him. Over the course of the novel, he comes to some sort of acceptance of the gap between his self-view and that of the outside world.

Where he does have a major talent is with the laaadies. He has hooked up with many women and casually discarded them, then picking them back up when he has the whim. But even this is starting to sour as some turn the tables on him.

The second narrative theme is Koko’s burgeoning interest in sex. But this is often viewed as something rather frightening and distasteful, a harsh comparison to the way her father acceptably coast through bedrooms. Koko’s coming of age and her growing into herself are a golden thread in this sometimes discordant melody.

My problem (and, having read the author’s note and seen how much work has gone into this novel, I feel really mean about being so blunt) is that I found Circus a pretty unpleasant and rather pathetic character and was really annoyed by the women who were charmed by him and then hung around limply waiting for him to call. So, despite the skill that has clearly gone into creating these characters, the elegant writing, and the fluid structure, it is more a book I could appreciate rather than enjoy.

Thanks to Pantheon and Netgalley for the digital review copy.