Escaping Indigo

May 15, 2017
Micah always imagined he’d be onstage drumming, but his best friend’s suicide by overdose upended his life. Barely holding it together, he lands a job as a roadie for his favorite band, Escaping Indigo. The group straddles the line between struggling and success, and their shoestring touring allows Micah to become very familiar with his idols. He discovers a mutual attraction with Bellamy, the lead singer, after some confusing (and not particularly convincing) early interactions. Lang masterfully captures the hesitancy and insecurity of both men as they try to move beyond their pasts. The new relationship forces Micah to explore his feelings for his dead bandmate and explain them to himself and others, helping readers feel the complexity of his grief. Lang’s handling of Bellamy’s anxiety and depression rings true; she shows how he has learned to hide his misery but never downplays its effect on him. These heavy subjects are balanced by plenty of hope and some tender, charged erotic scenes. Some readers will wish Micah and Bellamy could simply talk through things more directly, but the problems here are real and the solutions are genuine.

June 15, 2017
A young, burned-out musician finds himself drawn to the talented frontman of the band that's employing him as a roadie.Grieving a recent loss, Micah is marking time while working for a band he's always admired in Lang's (Half, 2017) rocker romance. As he and Bellamy, the band's singer/songwriter, start a slow-burn love affair, Micah struggles to separate his fan adoration from this relationship, which bears palimpsests of past loves for each of them. His first-person point of view enhances the sense of a groupie crushing on an underground hipster celebrity while staying cool. Meanwhile, Bellamy's rock-star polish is a veneer concealing his own worries about old choices and new musical challenges. The pair are sketched like characters in yaoi manga, the Japanese Boy Love genre, complete with bangs and emo arguments. The stilted dialogue, possibly meant to imitate youthful indecision, surfaces in clumps between long stretches of description and angst-ridden self-scrutiny. The underdeveloped characters and teen-diary-like passages mar an otherwise valuable portrayal of how an anxiety disorder affects seemingly functional people (like Bellamy) and erratically shapes all aspects of their lives. The band's unofficial manager, Quinn, is a more intriguing character for his lack of navel-gazing and almost demands his own story. The music festival/road trip trope also verges on something poignant but is oddly dated, as if a recounting of secondhand stories of Woodstock or Vans Warped Tour. The overall effect is of a m/m boy-band fan-fic YA recast unconvincingly as a new-adult romance. A pair of pretty musicians, a hesitant attraction that flowers on a concert bus tour, and sophomoric sensibilities trying to grapple with existential questions. For fans of boy manga and K-pop.

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June 1, 2017
Two emotionally wounded musicians fear intimacy and vulnerability, yet they fall in love in Lang's touching story. Sweetly attentive former drummer Micah, who is grieving over a deceased lover, is smitten by the riveting, world-weary Bellamy, who fronts for the Escaping Indigo band, and his tenderness helps both men heal as they haltingly let down their guards, learn to trust, and encourage each other's aspirations. Micah tells Bellamy, You have to breathe it and dream it when you sleep, you have to be immersed. You have to crave it, all of it. A very romantic same-sex love story.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)