Actual rating: 3.5 stars.

What I liked:
- I love a good rock band story; this reminded me a bit of Daisy Jones & the Six with the oral history. But overall it's a very unique story and a very unique structure.
- The band members have personality, they're all different, they all have qualities and flaws, and it was easy to care about their story.
- The various references and comparisons to existing musical acts really made it feel like Poor Ghost was a real band, part of music history.
- I also enjoyed the exploration of fame, privacy, media and social media.
- The ending was satisfying to me.

What I didn't like:
- The inclusion of the pandemic was done well, but it evoked a stress response in me so I didn't really enjoy it.
- The jumps between the oral history, Caleb's POV, the text chains, the tweets, the neighborhood forums, the magazine excerpts etc. were really confusing to me at times and some of these inclusions felt pointless in the story.
- I really really struggled with the second-person narration for Caleb's POV and I didn't understand the point of it.

This was an interesting look at fame, stardom, and fandom. Sadly, almost all of the music references, aside from U2 and Taylor Swift, were essentially lost on me. My tastes run more toward Merle Haggard. The epilogue felt odd to me - It just didn’t fit the tone of the rest of the story.

This is a book about a plane carrying a rock band, how it crashed and what happened after. While the story is quiet on the outside, for the most part, there are a lot of moving parts as we see the stories of band members and family.
The story is particularly interesting to me because it's set in time around the pandemic, with all the effects on interactions, such as how it limited the band's movement. I'm not sure what the point was but it was interesting and I feel like everything was tied up to my satisfaction.
Thanks to NetGalley for letting me read this

Poor Ghost are an evergreen rock band, reinventing themselves and holding on to an appeal that reaches across decade and spanning generations. That is until the plain they are flying in comes crashing out of the sky, landing in the backyard of an unassuming retired insurance salesman, Caleb Crane.

What follows next is like nothing I've ever read before. There are three distinct, interwoven sections - Caleb's story; the oral history of the band; and the texts and forum postings of the band's fans, all drawing closer and closer to one ultimate finale.

While this was marketed as satire, the themes in this range from dementia and elder care (Crane's father), Q-conspiracies, Covid, music, rabid fandoms and so much more, leaving one thoughtful, perhaps, rather than laugh-out-loud. Many real, contemporary events are referenced , giving the story a fixed date stamp

I would very much like the band Poor Ghost to be real, because the music and the albums mentioned in the story were so detailed and there were moments I wanted to google further about them (before remembering they're fictional!). There are many real artists name-dropped throughout the story, from U2 to Timbaland, and mentioned as being influenced, influencing or connected in some way to the fictional band.

This was a well written, interesting, thought provoking story that I'll be thinking about for a while.

~ Many thanks to NetGalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review~

I'm very happy to say that I enjoyed this novel a lot. However, I was a little bit worried about it at first, due to the alternating chapters that are written in the second-person point of view.

I generally dislike reading stories told in the second person, so I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to enjoy the chapters written that way. In fact, after a couple of chapters like that, I was very close to putting the book aside and marking it as a 'DNF' (did not finish), because of how much I normally dislike reading the second person.

Thankfully, though, I kept reading the book - and I'm very glad I did. I quickly realized that author David Starkey is a very clever and talented writer. He made those second-person chapters incredibly compelling to read and I ended up pushing aside my normal disdain for that point of view. After a while, because of how good the story is, I even began to forget that I was reading chapters written in the second person. Also, without giving away anything here about the story, I can now understand why the author chose to write those chapters in the second person. It didn't make sense to me at first, but it did over time.

Not every chapter is told from that point of view, though. Some are told in an oral history format, as if we're reading a biography about the band members of the fictional band Poor Ghost, with each of the members giving us their perspectives on different things about their lives. In that regard, it reminded me a lot of how the story in Taylor Jenkins Reid's exceptional novel 'Daisy Jones & The Six' was written.

Other chapters throughout 'Poor Ghost' are presented quite differently. Some are written in the form of them being excerpts from newspaper stories, online message boards, text messages, and more.

It's quite a unique way it's all structured and I think the author did a very impressive job with it all.

As a music fan, I especially loved the parts of the book about the music of Poor Ghost. From what I understand, the author is a musician. I'm not at all surprised. To me, it was very clear that he is a music lover himself.

The more I read about the music of the band Poor Ghost, the more I kept wishing that they had been an actual real band. I wanted to hear the songs and albums I kept reading about!

I'm very glad I read this book and I look forward to reading more fiction by author David Starkey in the future. I hope this is the first of many novels by him.

NOTE: I received an advanced reading copy of this novel from the publisher.

Thank you to NetGalley and Turner Publishing for the eARC.

This book was okay for me. I liked the concept a lot, but like many others I have seen after reading it really struggle with a 2nd person narration. Still not a bad book.

Satire, social remark, and a everyman involved in the crash of the jet of a famous rock band. There's the story of Caleb, the everyman, and the story of the band.
An entertaining story the will surely appeal to fun of stories featuring rockstarts.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

I can’t decide between 3 and 3.5 for this.

A plane crashes into Caleb Cranes backyard with only one survivor and it happens to be a famous bands private plane. It explores a Covid/post covid world and the grief of losing loved ones during the pandemic all while piecing together what happened with the plane crash.

Personal preference is probably why I didn’t rate this higher. I don’t really like second person POV. I think it was to connect the reader more to Caleb but I felt more disconnected with that writing device.

I thought the story was solid and explored many hard themes really well including grief, qanon conspiracies, the division covid created in families with ideologies and alternative “facts” which was interesting to explore still feeling quite close to the covid times.

Thanks to NetGalley and Turner Publishing for an eARC.

A plane carrying famous rock band Poor Ghost comes crashing down in insurance salesman Caleb Crane’s backyard, turning his quiet life upside down. Caleb seems, to me, to represent the people - all of us who lived through COVID, lost loved ones and never quite got back to “normal.” He finds himself making connections with the trespassing fans who hang around the crash site. Caleb’s story is intertwined with an oral history of Poor Ghost, which, by the end, feels somehow inseparable.

I’m not sure I really understand what this book was trying to say, but I enjoyed reading it. In addition to the “mixed media” format, mixing online comments with magazine articles and text messages, I was intrigued by the mystery surrounding what actually happened on the plane. Even though we can never know for sure (we weren’t on the plane, after all) I felt satisfied with the explanation we ended up with. This book doesn’t necessarily have a happy ending, but it felt resolved.

Poor Ghost by David Starkey i March s sheer brilliance in its format, concept and narrative. Poor Ghost are a famous rock band whose private jet crashes into the Back yard of Caleb, a widower

Calebs world is turned upside down as media pundits descend onto his quiet neighbourhood, invading his sanctum and disrupting his grieving process

The book has multiple povs, the documentary, the band history, tthe interviewer of Caleb and the babbling masses online. David Starkey at once writes a novel that is interesting and engaging as a story, but also reflective of soceity today and how media and celebrity clash with privacy and real life

A brilliant read and very well done.

Thank you to Netgalley, Turner Publishing Company, Keylight Books and David Starkey for this brilliant ARC. My review is left voluntarily and all opinions are my own. Poor Ghost is due to publish on 19 March 2024

Starkey's debut into novels is an excellent exploration of Poor Ghost - a famous band who fell tragically from the sky.

With it's Shakespearean underpinnings and deeper messages behind the band's lyrics we explore how music is such a shaper in our lives. How are memories are tied in to the music we like, we heard, we remember and the feelings that it evoked. How these feelings are connected to the people who make the music and how when something happens to these people, we the music lovers feel that somethings has touched as as well.

Starkey layers his story by using mixed media, going through the band itself, it's fans, the weirdos, the people whose life changed because a plane fall on their house and their story. He gathers all these separate bits and creates a complex whole.

An ARC kindly provided by author/publisher via Netgalley.

I read an advanced readers copy of David Starkey's Poor Ghost thanks to NetGalley and the publisher Turner Publishing Company, Keylight Books. The book is described by the publisher as: “On a September afternoon in Santa Barbara, a private jet carrying the members of Poor Ghost—one of America’s most storied rock bands—plunges into the backyard of Caleb Crane, a retired insurance salesman. Still mourning his wife’s death from Covid, Caleb finds himself navigating trauma, grief, and loss, all while his quiet neighborhood is invaded by pushy reporters and rabid Poor Ghost fans”

.But the book is much more complex, in the way the story is told. It is part Daisy Jones and the Six with a documentary-style “oral history” of the band, interspersed with Caleb’s story, which is always told in particular manner. It isn’t first person, but it is “you were surprised.,” as if the story is being told for Caleb. Then there is a third voice, a set of online chatrooms/forums providing the voice of the legion of Poor Ghost fans,

The format takes a bit to get used to, but it works. That said, I found myself reading more quickly through some of the oral history and wanting more of Caleb’s story. But the book keeps you interested.

What I wish I had was a better sense of Poor Ghost’s actual music; we get the lyrics and the crazy song names, and comparison bands (often referencing real bands and to the best of my knowledge, producers), but that’s just a minor quip.

This is an interesting book and worth the time to read.

At first glance, its quite the easy story. Plane crashes with a famous band on board in the field of our main character but it turned out to be much more. David Starkey has a way with words and pacing that I found very engaging.
I feel like I really got to know Caleb – the main character if we can call him that – and that the journey he went through emotionally was interesting to read and follow. You really wanted the best for him. That is important in books and this story got there.

The story has a mixed format in which the reader not only get the main story but also other bits surrounding it. There are interviews with the band, comments on YouTube, text conversations. I liked this and thought this format fitted the story as the reader gets to now the impact the band Poor Ghost had on the world the book takes place in (which is our own… just where this band is up there in legend status).

I really enjoyed this story and think it would work good in most formats. Would be interesting to listen to it in audiobook form if it’s ever released in that format too.