🎸🎸1/2
BEATLES AND BEACONS
FRAN RAYA
THE BOOK GUILD
Publication Date: January 28th, 2024
208 Pages
Goodreads | Amazon
I didn’t enjoy this book as much as I thought I would. I thought I was getting a cute story of a pre-teen who loves The Beatles. Today (February 9th, 2024) marks the 60th anniversary of when the band played on Ed Sullivan. I wasn’t born until 1966 but even I know about Beatlemania. The lead character takes this up a notch. A lot of the book felt like a history of the band, not the band themselves but a lot of dates, times and places. Facts of when and where they played and when albums and singles were released. A lot of telling and not much doing. A lot of the information I was already aware of but I admit I did learn a few things along the way and I found that to be interesting. There is a lot of italicized internal dialogue and I liked that, I know some people don’t so be forewarned. There is some poetry in the book that I enjoyed and thought was well written.
I did not like the main character, Becca, at all. She needed a swift kick in the ass. Her behaviour needed some firm discipline and if she were my child the records and posters would be taken away, never to be seen again unless she improved her grades and attitude. I don’t know why he parents allowed her to act that way, especially where her grades were concerned. I have had mad crushes on band members but I never acted the way she did and my mother wouldn’t let me, she just was just plain rude and insulting. It wasn’t cute at twelve and it certainly wasn’t at fifteen either.
We get a lot of information about the family background, particularly the mother’s side. This is not a light read as there is spousal abuse and child sexual abuse. This goes a long way to explain Becca’s behaviour, I guess, but her parents are not aware of it and they never discuss their daughter’s way of acting at all. Maybe that’s the way it was at the time but I still can’t see her getting a pass for it. All in all, this wasn’t what I was expecting when I read the blurb and I felt like I was reading a textbook getting ready for an exam.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the Advance Readers Copy.
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