Dawnie Walton

This book is structured as a series of interviews, newspaper clippings, transcript excerpts, and the interviewer's own commentary. Generally, I don't care for novels so constructed but it worked very well here. Dawnie Walton wrote quite a compelling debut novel.

It is 2015. The interviewer, Sunny Shelton, is the first female and Black editor in chief of Aural Magazine, obviously based on Rolling Stone. She is gathering an oral history surrounding a momentarily brilliant avant-garde proto-punk duo and a tragic event that occurred at their biggest show. The tragedy at the center involved Ms. Shelton's father, the drummer backing Opal and Nev.

We meet Nev Charles first, a carrot-topped British singer-songwriter, who moves to New York City to try to make it in the music business circa 1970. He goes on tour to try to find a female singer to team up with and after months on the road, he and his manager, Bob Hize, got to a local bar in Detroit, where Nev sees Opal and Pearl Robinson perform at an open mic event. Pearl is the one with the real voice, but Nev sees something in Opal that compels him to sign her up. They make one album but it does not do well. Their first big opportunity for wider exposure ends tragically in racial violence. While they try touring again after they recover from their physical injuries, their mental injuries from the riot ruin whatever magic they once had. Nev goes into rehab; Opal goes to Paris for nearly a year. The moment is lost. Nev goes on to have a successful solo pop career.

Opal Jewel (she chose Jewel as her stage name) is a complex, interesting central character in this novel. She is revealed to us early in the story through her her outward appearance: outrageous costuming, bright colors, wigs, her shaved head (she suffers from alopecia), but as the interviews unfold throughout, we start to see a little more of her inner self. Decades later, when Ms. Shelton is interviewing people for her story, we learn she, too, is tied to the Opal and Nev story. She is therefore on hand to witness the one last time Opal and Nev performed together, when Opal was in her late sixties.

Ms. Walton uses both the characters of Opal and Ms. Shelton to highlight how this country has never fully reckoned with racism or held its racists accountable for the damage they have done, the atrocities they have perpetrated, the lives they have destroyed. She creates this fictional band and weaves it into the real history of the 1970s beautifully. The only criticism I have is the device of the "editor's notes" because they seemed to interrupt the flow of the narrative. That is the only thing that took away from a perfect rating from me.… (mehr)

Slow start but ultimately hard to put down. The story is engaging, and I like the structure of seeing the narrative evolve through the voices of different characters embedded within the larger structure of notes for an oral history the narrator is researching. It takes staggering writing skill to make a structure like that work as compelling reading! As other reviewers said, by the ending I was wishing Opal & Nev – or at least their records – were real.

Thanks to #NetGalley for advance copy.… (mehr)

I absolutely enjoyed how real the characters felt. I could see Opal being an actual person, and I loved her narrative, spunkiness, and confidence. I've (personally) never read a fake documentary in book form, but I couldn't put this book down.

And I love how it mentions black people's creation and contribution to rock music and our, at times, strained relationship with it. I've heard many times rock referred to as the devil's or white people's music lol.

Anyway, it is a common trope to have the journalist have a personal tie/self-invested interest in some way to the subject matter of their story, but I loved that Opal & Nev didn't drag that reveal out. It's mentioned on the first page, so we already know why the journalist has stakes in the story.

Everything in this story felt plausible. I felt like I was watching an episode of Unsung.… (mehr)

This is the story of a young singer who teams up with an aspiring songwriter. It’s all about their success, then their inevitable breakup and downfall, ending with the expected comeback. The story is a flashback, told in short segments by the point of view of many characters. Too many characters, too many viewpoints. Readers will be subjected to different recountings of the same incidences too many times. The result is disjointed narrative. The novel is thoroughly laced with gratuitous bad language, which, if eliminated, would probably decrease the length of the novel by 25%. While many reviewers praised this novel, I disliked the writing style as well as the political nature that permeated the book.… (mehr)