The premise of this book--three girls in a rock band set in 1990s in Washington--is fantastic. I didn't have to read much more than that to request the book.

Sadly, the novel does not live up to its promise. The writing sounds very young and I don't know if that's because the author was trying to sound like a "teen" or because the author is a newer writer. Most of everything was "told" and underdeveloped. The characters were especially underdeveloped, coming across as one-dimensional. I had such hight hopes for this book. The use of the 1990s and the setting of Opal, Washington also felt like missed promise. The three main characters were so very close to the heart of Riot Grrrl. Why wouldn't they be influenced by or at least come into contact with it??

I really wanted to like this book. *I’m not the biggest fan of riot grrrl, but I’ll probably read anything about girls playing rock music together. But this was just… bad. The writing was bland and underdeveloped. I couldn’t connect to the story, the characters, any of it.

Moving on to the characters. There are three members of ‘the Heartbreakers’ and I honestly could barely tell them apart. There’s Alexis, who’s coming to terms with her sexuality. Her best friend, Brooke, who has a crush on an asshole named Tyler. And new girl Ollie, who plays drums in Tyler’s Metallica cover band. There was a lot of potential, but not a single one of them felt like a fully fleshed-out person.

*I was definitely expecting the riot grrrl movement to play a bigger role than it actually did but even that was a missed opportunity. Why write a story about three girls in a rock band, and set in 1990s Washington, of all places, if you’re not going to do anything interesting with it?