Tuesday, March 11, 2014

Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler

3 Stars
 
ARC received from NetGalley. Thank you NetGalley!!!!!

The story of four childhood friends (and one wife), their marriages and divorces, successes and failures, as they attempt to navigate their way through their early 30s.

Until the day I started reading Shotgun Lovesongs, I had no idea the story was inspired by the author’s friendship with Justin Vernon of Bon Iver fame. In all honesty, the book got bumped ahead of some others on the TBR once I discovered this fact. I thought perchance it would remove “Skinny Love” from playing on an endless loop in my brain.

Wellllllll, I’m still singing “Skinny Love” – probably even more so now since reading this made Bon Iver become my Pandora flavor of the week. What can I say about this book? What did it make me feel? Sometimes it’s best to let the book speak for itself: “Melancholy is such a dramatic sounding word, but sometimes it’s the right one. When you’re feeling both a little happy and a little sad.”. This book made me feel melancholy the entire time I was reading it.

Nickolas Butler definitely has promise – he put readable words on paper, but something was just a bit off or missing. A couple of things that stood out were how many narrators were speaking in such a short novel and the bouncing back and forth between the present and past sometimes had me reading a few paragraphs or pages before I knew if I was in the “now” or “then”. But for a debut???? Butler did just fine. I will be interested in seeing what he comes up with next.

If you’re a fan of Justin Vernon and want to get a sneaky peak into what he might have been like/might be when he’s not busy being “Bon Iver”, this book will probably make you fall in love with him a little (or a little more).



If you’ve stuck through this review and still have no clue who I’m talking about, go download “Skinny Love” and thank me later when it remains on your iPod shuffle list ; )

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5l8otW...

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