Book Review: Motor City Love Song by Lisa Peers

Official Synopsis: No one knows why the queen of indie rock vanished from the Detroit scene twenty years ago. Now, her ex-girlfriend is determined to track her down—and what she uncovers will change everything.

Detroit, 1997. At the Artemis Club, Paloma is chasing rock-and-roll stardom, with her girlfriend and manager Jace committed to making her a worldwide indie sensation. But when Paloma suddenly disappears from the public eye in 2001, Jace is left to pick up the pieces.

Two decades later, Jace learns The Artemis Club is in trouble. Saving it will mean tracking down Paloma, whose early-career hit just went viral. Paloma has her reasons for not wanting to be found, and Jace isn’t eager to reopen old wounds. Still, each keeps measuring her life against the love she lost. With the Artemis Club’s fate at stake, Jace and Paloma are pulled back into the scene they once ruled . . . and back toward each other.

Motor City Love Song is both a love story and a story about finding love within the garage band scene of Detroit in the 80s and 90s. This novel is told by jumping between the 'now' and 'then' and told in two POVS (at different times). First we meet Jace, who is working her 'now' career as a large scale event planner in Detroit and is looking back at her life in the music scene within the city. When one of her favorite venues, the Artemis Club, is at risk of closing, Jace is determined to keep it afloat, even if that means opening up the old wounds from a past she still hasn't fully moved on from. Jace starts to work on finding Paloma, her ex-girlfriend and former rock star who disappeared one day and Jace hasn't seen her since. As we learn about Jace's plans in the current time, we also get flashbacks to when Jace and Paloma were together and moving through the transition from garage band to super-star, and how the touring and attention effected them both.

It is when Jace finally gets ahold of Paloma that we get into her POV, and we get to see how Paloma has been doing for the last two decades, and what has changed around her. We also get to see why she ran off to begin with, and how she perceived the events of what happened between her and Jace back in the day. Paloma has been using an alias to write music for other artists, performing at small bars in the upper parts of Michigan and keeping herself away from the limelight. But when she is approached to headline the benefit concert for Artemis Club, she is torn. Paloma never wanted the spotlight, she mostly wanted to make music and be with Jace, but the more Jace turned into a manager instead of the person she loved, the harder it was for her to stay. That and some bad choices led to things Paloma couldn't believe.

Now Paloma and Jace are meant to work together again, after two decades of hurting and wondering if they could heal from what happened between them. Jace and Paloma are two complicated characters in the way that they aren't always honest with each other for the sake of the other's feelings, and how that overall effected how they fell apart in the past. Now that they are older, wiser and have been apart, we get to see how time can change a person while also keeping little parts of them that are the same. This story has a lot of strong themes but overall is about the different types of love that someone can experience. I really enjoyed how the background to all of it was the music scene in Detroit and the gritty sound that would be associated with that. I think it was a cool era of music and fun to see a story take place in that instead of in the more large-scale music scenes. You can tell the author definitely knows a lot about the scene and that it means a lot to them in the way they wrote about it.

Overall, I think this is a different type of love story, even with its happily ever after and the rockstar part of it all, I really found it a lot more moving than some of the other romances I've read. I liked how deeply connected the author felt to the scene and how the music was at the core of everything that happened within the plot. I also enjoyed how queer everyone was in the story, which does really track. There are a lot of interesting side characters as well who really make the story great.

I rated this book 3.5 / 5 Stars!

Motor City Love Song is out now!

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