I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone

July 28, 2008
Emily Black, heroine of this '90s-era novel, grows up in a small Wisconsin town where everyone expects her to turn out “bad,” like her mother, Louisa, who abandoned husband and daughter early in Emily's childhood. Emily eagerly imbibes the legends about Louisa (her favorite: fleeing town on the back of a motorcycle, a teenage Louisa hurls her high heels through store windows on Main Street) and tells herself she doesn't miss her mother, yet Emily nurtures herself on Louisa's punk-rock ethos, eventually forming a band. Debut author Kuehnert keeps the story raw and gritty as Emily's band starts making it on the music scene, throwing in plenty of sex, booze and drugs, but weakens her grip by alternating Emily's story with Louisa's. The two are briefly reunited in a coincidence-heavy, rushed ending. The writing runs toward excess (“In the dim moonlight, remorse bruised circles under her dark eyes and traced lines around them”) but the intensity of the characters' emotions and experiences will beguile many teen readers. Ages 14–up.

June 1, 2008
Punk rocker Emily Blacks daddy is a guitar player, but he set his music aside to raise her on his own after her mother disappeared. Emily grew up reasonably together and rebellious in a small Wisconsin farming town notable for its outlaw music venue, Rivers Edge, where she and her best friend graduate from sleeping with potential "rock gods" to starting a band of their own. Their rapid success is the standard-issue rock-and-roll dream, but debut novelist Kuehnert makes it new by marshaling tonic energy and 100-proof candor to create a high-speed, switchback tale. Although the plotline about Emilys miserable mother and die-hard father is almost too over-the-top, it adds dimension to Emilys rocketing rise and painful plummet. And Kuehnert is acidly incisive and full-out entertaining as she tells a classic tale of an artist coming into her own, revels in raw punk-rock power, dramatizes just how difficult it is for women musicians to be taken seriously, and reveals that the scariest thing isnt getting up on stage but lowering your guard and falling in love.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)