My last two audio books for the year – one was dire, the other had a particularly interesting element.

Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley

…authenticity, seems to me, to be only one metric by which to judge music. And I don’t see why it should swallow all the other ones, including beauty and fun. 

This book promised so much – music, some unrequited (or rather, poorly timed) love, a distinct time setting (early 2000s). Alas, it failed to deliver. The voice of the main character, a woman named Percy, never veered from pretentious and opinionated. I simply cannot believe that any one person thinks and speaks about music a hundred percent of the time, and that everything she said and did was compared to a song. The music facts could have created an interesting sense of place and time, however, after the thousandth time Percy dissected a bridge, a melody, or the key selected by a musician, I felt like I was in a lecture. A really, really boring lecture.

There were elements of Brickley’s own experience in this book (the main character has a job in trend research, which is what Brickley did before writing). But I wondered, if it’s based on her own life, why make Percy such a painful person to be around? I should have abandoned this book but kept going because I thought it would turn around. It didn’t. Apparently there’s a movie coming.

1.5/5

Mother Tongue by Naima Brown

I read a sample of this book and gave it a ‘maybe’ rating… and then it popped up in my library’s audio offerings. I had a road-trip ahead, so it seemed a good choice. And it was the perfect light entertainment, with the addition of some interesting points-of-difference (those being bilingual aphasia and objectophilia). The main character in the story suffers a brain injury and wakes from a coma speaking French.

There are some elements of the plot that over-complicated things (you know when you feel an author is putting all their good ideas in one book?) but nevertheless, the story held my interest, and the descriptions of the main character’s experience with language were fascinating.

I might have given Mother Tongue another star if it had been a little shorter – the drama toward the end of the book dragged it out.

3/5