In a love letter to nineties nostalgia, Cohen tells the tale of three teenage girls who get together and form a band. Alexis is dealing with her first big breakup, compounded by the fact that she just broke up with a girl and can't tell anyone because she's not at all ready to come out. Brooke, Alexis's longtime best friend, is finally getting the guy she's been pining after for years, but maybe he isn't as good as she's made him out to be. And new-to-town Ollie has newly divorced parents and has left Seattle, her friends, and her band, and joined a terrible Metallica cover band that doesn't respect her at all. The three grow closer and eventually realize that the best way to survive this life is to start a rocking band.
My biggest complaint is that the description is slightly misleading. The band doesn't form until about 80% of the way through. Their band is a really actually very minor part of this book, The description makes it sound like a big feature, but it's not. Most of the book is about the girls' personal struggles and their relationships with each other, which is fine and was still good, but the music is not a very big component. It felt like a prequel to the band through most of the book, or exposition. All three of the girls are mostly interesting and distinct enough. Brooke's plotline, which felt the most shallow at first, actually became the deepest, which was nice to see. This book dealt with a lot of heavier topics in a relatively short span, which was impressive. At times, the nineties setting felt overbearing, like Cohen needed to keep reminding the reader that it was indeed the nineties, but for the most part, it was pretty good.

Not sure why this book has such low scores. I’ll admit it wasn’t really giving a 90s vibe but I thought the characters were unique and the story was decent. It was a pretty quick read that I liked.

Thanks to NetGalley for the arc.

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?