The Lightning Bottles
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Average rating4.4
The author of New York Times bestseller and Reese’s Book Club pick Lucky returns with a spellbinding story of rock ’n’ roll and star-crossed love—about grunge-era musician Jane Pyre’s journey to find out what really happened to her husband and partner in music, who abruptly disappeared years earlier. He was the troubled face of rock ’n’ roll…until he suddenly disappeared without a trace. Jane Pyre was once half of the famous rock n’ roll duo, the Lightning Bottles. Years later, she’s perhaps the most hated—and least understood—woman in music. She was never as popular with fans as her bandmate (and soulmate), Elijah Hart—even if Jane was the one who wrote the songs that catapulted the Lightning Bottles to instant, dizzying fame, first in the Seattle grunge scene, then around the world. But ever since Elijah disappeared five years earlier and the band’s meteoric rise to fame came crashing down, the public hatred of Jane has taken on new levels, and all she wants to do is retreat. What she doesn’t anticipate is the bombshell that awaits her at her new home in the German countryside: the sullen teenaged girl next door—a Lightning Bottles superfan—who claims to have proof that not only is Elijah still alive, he’s also been leaving secret messages for Jane. And they need to find them right away. A cross-continent road trip about two misunderstood outsiders brought together by their shared love of music, The Lightning Bottles is both a love letter to the 90s and a searing portrait of the cost of fame.
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3.5 stars. I'm a sucker for novels about musicians, and The Lightning Bottles offers an engaging Gen X version of the genre whose tropes include the power of music, the perils of fame, and the sexism of the music industry. Using a mix of real and fictional musicians (Courtney Love and Michael Stipe are name dropped, but for some reason Sinead O'Connor and Kurt Cobain are represented by thinly veiled versions of themselves), Stapley captures that confusing time in 1990s Seattle when musicians wanted to be well known enough to be appreciated for their art, but not so famous that they could be accused of selling out. The arcs of talented, naive musician Jane and the charismatic but emotionally fragile Elijah are largely predictable, down to Elijah's jealous best friend and the Yoko Onofication of Jane. But the involvement of Hen, a lonely teenaged German fan, who encounters Jane five years after the Lightning Bottles' disastrous breakup, provides an interesting, fresh note. And the mystery of Elijah's fate is less obvious; I'm still not sure how I feel about the resolution. The Lightning Bottles may not be striking enough to be adapted into a star-studded TV series like [b:Daisy Jones & The Six 40597810 Daisy Jones & The Six Taylor Jenkins Reid https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1580255154l/40597810.SY75.jpg 61127102]. But it's enjoyable on its own, less flashy terms. And the song lyrics are only slightly cringe. ARC received from Net Galley and publisher in exchange for objective review.
