Liner Notes
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
How do you share the soundtrack of your life?
Just out of grad school, Laney is ready to embark on a new phase of her life. Leaving California to head back east, she’s got three thousand miles to reflect on her past before moving ahead to the future. With a box of mixed tapes at the ready, she envisions a trip spent reminiscing about first crushes, high school, family issues, and college loves and losses—her most precious memories. What she doesn’t picture is her mother in the seat beside her—which is exactly what happens when her mom invites herself along for the ride. Soon, Laney’s giving her mother a crash course in retro hits from her formative years—and a history of her life that her mom never knew about. As they roll through the American landscape, Laney and her mother discover that their lives are no one-hit wonders.
“Liner Notes tells the story of two simultaneous journeys—a cross country road trip and a musical voyage down memory lane—that both end up in the same happy place. Like one of the narrator’s prize mix tapes, Emily Franklin’s charming debut novel is a grab-bag of delights.” —Tom Perrotta, author of Little Children
“This book is a rare one—the gimmick is actually well-executed, making this story as good as it sounds. With realistic characters, fantastic flashbacks, and a great soundtrack, you are sure to laugh, cry and sing along with Laney as you read her Liner Notes.” —Bildungsroman
Emily Franklin is the author of Liner Notes and a story collection, The Girls’ Almanac. She is also the author or coauthor of over a dozen young adult books including The Half-Life of Planets (nominated for YALSA’s Best Book of the Year) and Tessa Masterson Will Go to Prom (named to the 2013 Rainbow List). A former chef, she wrote the cookbook-memoir Too Many Cooks: Kitchen Adventures with 1 Mom, 4 Kids, and 102 Recipes to chronicle a year in the life of new foods, family meals, and heartache around the table. Her fiction and essays have appeared in the Boston Globe, Monkeybicycle, the Mississippi Review, Post Road Magazine, Carve Magazine, and Word Riot, as well as on National Public Radio, among others. Her recipes have been featured in numerous magazines and newspapers, and on many food websites. She lives with her husband, four kids, and one-hundred-sixty-pound dog outside of Boston.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As a writer for NPR's Car Talk, first-timer Franklin seems particularly qualified to pen a rollicking road-trip novel but a smooth ride requires more than just a basic familiarity with mechanics. Fresh out of grad school, Laney can't wait for a cross-country drive to a new job in her hometown of Boston. To Laney's horror, however, her mother in for a visit and in remission from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma decides to come along. The narrative moves unswervingly forward, toward home and a friendship between mother and daughter. From Carmel, Calif., through Tulsa, Okla., to Graceland and home, Laney and Annie grow closer. Readers learn about Laney as she chats in the car, filling her mother in on all she missed while she was ill and reminiscing about summer camp and old best friends. These flashbacks depend on a heavy-handed and not entirely effective gimmick: each recollection is sparked by a mix tape. Laundry lists of chart-toppers, cult hits and novelty songs spanning the cassette era "Dancing on the Ceiling," "Burning Down the House," "Blister in the Sun" are offered as road signs to Laney's feelings. Said signs may be indecipherable to all but the most reverent fan of 1980s music, however, and the string of titles fails to tie Franklin's scattered anecdotes together. The book's romantic element, telescoped into a few final chapters, turns on a long-lost mix and a happy coincidence. It's wildly unlikely, but so heavily foreshadowed that readers won't put up much resistance.
