Technically speaking, this book felt more like both an incomplete narrative and a collection of stories. I should not have liked it. The online reviews have been kind of brutal as well. That said, there was something about the potential in the narrative that attracted me to it.
There are a lot of moving parts to the story, and some of them were entertaining. This book is set in the future, in a world where a lot of things have been dealt with scientifically and in this futuristic world, very few people are disabled in any form or fashion. Our primary protagonist is one of them. She is the only deaf person on the planet, and she is almost a curiosity to the world. She has some good friends, and their friendship is the foundation that the entire thing builds on.
The unfinished parts include the history of the war that everyone keeps referring back to and what secrets might still be hidden because of it, the economic system of this world, and the health of the protagonist's mother, not to mention illegal QR codes that seem to be increasingly used to cause personal blackouts!
I would not recommend this book to anyone but the more adventurous. I liked my experience, and it was short enough for me to breeze through.
I received an ARC thanks to NetGalley and the publishers, but the review is entirely based on my own reading experience.

The book is wonderful and from the concept of it exploring a deaf character being able to play drums and being cheered on from friends is wonderful. I like that. However, I personally feel like that this somehow got side tracked at some point. At least it felt like that to me.

Unfortunately I really didn't gel with the writing style of this book. I love the idea of the POV of the deaf girl as the focus of the story, and how she interacts with the world, but the way it is written (as a sort of diary) causes it to be very stilted and unnatural to read. Perhaps this is an issue with translation - I'm not sure, but it feels like it is the content itself, Everything is described in a flat manner, with little interest or visually descriptive language, and yet somehow there is a lot of unnecessary information that makes it feel like a slow read. I loved the concept (though the sci-fi part is very much just a background) and I think it would be wonderful to read the core plot of this novel if presented differently.

Thanks to Net Galley and the publisher for this ARC - all opinions here are my own, honest, and freely given.

The perspective is from a young girl and the book is written accordingly. So it's very simple prose and short sentences with no interesting writing. I did mind it, it made the book hard to want to continue reading because it wasn't written well.
But at the same time the children sometimes act nothing like children. They converse or reason in ways that are too adult ! Or they just clearly say stuff for exposition and it is not natural at all !
It really is a middle grade book about the life of a young girl as she navigates life and self development. The sci fi element is really just a backdrop (I am not saying this is bad).

I picked this up because of the cover and unfortunately I really wish I liked this more than I did. Music As I Know It is written from the perspective of a young high school girl, Shaelin Demeter, set on planet Xenophon in the distant future a generation after humanity has survived near-extinction from an alien race. But despite the out-there backdrop, Shaelin goes to high school, hangs out with her friends after school, and avoids the bullies like any modern-day teenage girl. I've enjoyed the juxtaposition of 'events every reader has experienced' merged with a fun sci-fi what-if scenario as a mechanism to examine the author's existing society and culture. However, this one just didn't hit the mark. For one, I found the writing incredibly stiff. And while part of that can be attributed to the translational barrier, the way the dialogue is written, where characters remind each other of stuff they definitely all know just so the reader can know it too, just makes reading each conversation between Shaelin and her friends such a chore. My other big gripe is that because this story is written as Shaelin's diary, the author has deliberately chosen to have Shaelin describe, in mind-numbing detail, each and every action she takes, how society is structured, how an arcade works, how each game in an arcade is played, etc etc. In the right hands, this can be an extremely powerful method in highlighting how this world differs from the reader's. In this situation, it failed. Finally, there was this really random, oddly coherent, 10k word count rant about capitalism, power, and what makes someone evil coming from drunk fifteen-year-olds that felt so extremely out of place with the rest of the story. Overall, I rate this book 2/5 stars.