Some Strange Music Draws Me In
Griffin Hansbury
Daunt Books
In this engaging novel we flit between two time periods, first we meet thirteen year old Mel in 1984, living life in a small town America. She lives in Swaffham, Massachusetts, a blue-collar town which people dream of leaving to experience the bigger, brighter, outside world.
As teenagers Mel and her best mate Jules are pushing the boundaries and exploring everything they can. They’re swiping alcohol from their parents liquor cabinets, getting joints of older kids, and beginning experience new ways that people will treat them on the basis of gender, and sexuality.
Into their world comes a mysterious woman, driving a cool Trans-Am – she’s lived in New York, shares music they’ve not formally come across like Lou Reed and Patti Smith. They’re mesmerised by Sylvia, and her arrival in their town filled with prejudice and underlying seediness is life changing.
At the same time we follow the story of Max, in his later 40’s in 2019 he returned to Swaffham, Massachusetts leaving his career as an English teacher to care for his mother in her final months. Now he’s got to clean up and sell up the family home.
Returning to the small town after decades away he notices how much has changed, and how some things stay the same. Max has been through a lot of change, back in the 80s he was Mel, the awkward teenager trying to find her space in the world.
As we jump between the decades we get to know the same person and remarkably different points in their life, while at the same time gaining an insight into how much the world has changed. In the 80s, before there was any internet, finding out about news and culture was hard, never mind getting info on sexuality and gender issues.
As Mel notes, you can’t take a book out the local library, they write your name in the little card that slots into the front of the book letting the next lender see everyone who has borrowed the book before them.
Max spends time with his niece Dakota, who is completely au fait with the permutations of gender and sexuality, making Max feel like he’s now the out of touch older family member. Sorting through old boxes and long forgotten photos he’s taken back to the summer of 1984 when everything in his life began to change.
Griffin Hansbury’s novel quickly creates a captivating world filled with a range of distinctive characters, and in focusing in on that pivotal teenage time of first crushes, confusions, forming your own identity and trying to make sense of the world, he provokes you to go on your own journey of reminiscence.
Midway the story becomes somewhat meandering, but carry on through, it picks up to deliver a satisfying conclusion.
