All Our Pretty Songs is a lush YA retelling of the Orpheus myth (but different), set in the Pacific Northwest, written in a way that is pleasantly reminiscent of Francesca Lia Block. It starts with our unnamed narrator on summer vacation before her senior year of high school, introducing us to herself and her best friend, Aurora. The narrator’s mom and Aurora’s mom used to be best friends but no longer speak; the narrator’s dad has never been around, and Aurora’s dad, who was a famous rock star, is dead. Aurora’s mom is a junkie; the narrator’s mom is a witch (in the herbs-and-amulets-and-fortune-telling way, I mean). And the narrator and Aurora? They’re like sisters who have kind of raised themselves, with Aurora as the wilder one, the one who “never thinks about what comes after. She’s all now, all the time. This moment, this kiss, this second holds everything” (6).
Not long into the book, Aurora and the narrator meet Jack, a slightly-older singer/guitarist whose music is intense and beautiful and like nothing they’ve ever experienced. As the flap copy puts it, though, they’re “not the only ones who have noticed Jack’s gift; his music has awakened an ancient evil—and a world both above and below, which may not be mythical at all.” So, yeah, things get weird: at the same party where the narrator meets Jack, she notices a creepy guy who “smiles a smile with too many teeth” who’s also made rapt by Jack’s music (25). The creepy guy, whose name is Minos (yes, the mythological one), keeps showing up, pulling both Aurora and Jack into his orbit, in this interesting way where the narrator is pretty sure she’s seeing some supernatural stuff happening but still has doubts as to what’s actually going on: at one point Aurora’s mom asks where she is, and the narrator’s answer is priceless: “She either went to Los Angeles or she went to hell” (142).
Before the weird stuff, though, the narrator becomes smitten with Jack, and there are some pretty delicious scenes with the two of them, but what I like even more are the scenes with her and Aurora, or, best of all, with her and her friend from work, Raoul—they work together at a fruit stand at what basically seems to be Pike Place Market, and he’s totally my favorite character in the book. I like how the narrator figures herself out a bit over the course of the book, and how Raoul helps with that; I like his smarts and his kindness and his humor, and a conversation the narrator has with him at one point totally made me teary-eyed. I felt like the pacing of this book was somewhat uneven, but maybe it was just where I was in my reading of it: it felt like the plot was slow to get moving and then moved really quickly, but the writing was pleasing enough to keep me engaged even before the plot kicked in. I like how the narrator describes being up front at a show, watching a band: she says she and Aurora are “all the way inside our bodies and all the way outside them at the same time” (7). And I am a sucker for descriptive passages like this:
In the winter I love my work. All the out-of-towners flee the eternal damp. We have to wear sweaters and wool hats to keep out the cold, and we drink coffee until we’re cracked-out and speedy. The cobblestoned streets are wet and foggy, the low mournful sound of the ferry horn carries across the water, and all the afternoons are dreamy and quiet. (36)
This was a book I liked more as I got farther into it, a book I ended up staying up late to finish, and a book whose sequels I’m looking forward to reading.
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