This Song is (Not) For You by Laura Nowlin

This is one of those books that I was incredibly excited for, and when I got approved for this on NetGalley, I was ecstatic.  However, I just didn’t enjoy this one nearly as much as I had hoped I would.  I’m not entirely sure why this book and I weren’t a great fit, since it wasn’t exactly terrible, but I realized three quarters of the way through it that I was trying to force myself to enjoy it rather than actually just enjoying it because it was good.

Ramona and Sam are in a band together, where Ramona plays the drums and Sam plays guitar.  But see, deep down, they’re in love with each other and do that thing where they avoid the topic with one another but go on and on throughout the entire book about how in love they are.  Then Ramona realizes that she’s in love with the new member of their band, too.  His name is Tom, and he had recently gone through a breakup with this long term girlfriend, because she was tired of him not having those kinds of feelings for her.  So now Ramona is in love with two guys, and Tom wants to be with her, and so does Sam, and it just ends up being a crazy love triangle full of teenage angst and confusion (I think the guys were in love with each other, too?  I have no freaking clue).  So…I mean, the backstories for each of the characters were pretty nice…Ramona started taking piano lessons with her mother (who loved piano and was amazing at it) when she was young, and she kept up with it because she not only loved it, but felt like it was a way to connect to her mother, who had died.  Tom’s passion for glittering up everything he comes in contact with (a fire hydrant, for one), is a little strange, but hey, I’m all for embracing different interests.  But all of the things in this book seemed like they were just so messy.  The characters’ lives, the romance(s)…everything.

I’m not trying to say this was a bad book, because it wasn’t.  It was a quick read, and I read the entire thing on New Year’s Eve (I wanted to read one more book before the end of 2015!).  While I did finish it, I found myself losing interest and pretty much just being annoyed with the characters and how immature they seemed by the last half of the book, and I honestly found myself reading this just for the sake of reading, and not because I actually cared about what was going to happen.

So if this sounds like something you might be interested in, give it a go.  Like I said, it wasn’t a bad book, but it just wasn’t a good fit for me.

Note: I received an ARC of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.