Maria Literata: BOOK REVIEW: This Song Is (Not) for You by Laura Nowlin

This Song Is (Not) for You by Laura Nowlin

(Goodreads)

Ramona and Sam are best friends. She fell for him the moment they met, but their friendship is just too important for her to mess up. Sam loves Ramona, but he would never expect her to feel the same way-she's too quirky and cool for someone like him. Together, they have a band, and put all of their feelings for each other into music.

Then Ramona and Sam meet Tom. He's their band's missing piece, and before Ramona knows it, she's falling for him. But she hasn't fallen out of love with Sam either. How can she be true to her feelings without breaking up the band?

Thanks to SourceBooks Fire at Netgalley for providing me with an eARC!

The teenagers in this book are real. And like real teenagers, they can sometimes be incredibly annoying and supercilious (a word I learned today that fits perfectly; meaning "behaving or looking as though one thinks one is superior to others").

We meet Ramona, a high school senior at St. Joseph's Prep, a school "full of rich kids" and "poseurs". She thinks she's different than everyone and she likes to make it known. Her 'nemesis' is a girl in her year who once commented on Ramona's hair after she hacked it in the school bathroom with craft scissors.

In alternating chapters we meet Sam and Tom. Sam has been best friends with Ramona for years and together they form the band April and the Rain. Sam isn't so bad, like Ramona, he also "can't comprehend [high school girl's] level[s] of superficiality existing" (47). The thing is, Sam's been in love with Ramona forever, he just can't bring himself to say anything about it. He spends most of his time longing after her, his chapters mostly filled with him talking about her or thinking about her.

Tom, like Ramona, spends a lot of time trying to be different rather than genuinely being different. He walks around with shoes covered with the words 'Darfur' and 'Auschwitz' and hands out flyers to whoever asks about them. While this isn't necessarily a bad thing, like Ramona, he's incredibly judgmental. An entire chapter of his is dedicated to labeling cliques during lunch time and Tom saying how he doesn't fit in because he's so different.

The most frustrating thing about Tom is his art. There's a scene where his girlfriend is disturbed because he buys a bunch of goldfish and dumps them in a local fountain as a sort of Banksy-like art movement (he knows the fish will die and we later find out that the dead fish clogged up a pipe and cost the city thousands of dollars to repair). To that, he says "this really scared me to death because I was still on probation, and it really did upset me. Causing real harm goes against my ethics" (71). I wanted to scream when I read this. So it wasn't until monetary damage had done that he thought twice about dumping goldfish to their deaths?

However, unlike Ramona and Sam, Tom does redeem himself and show character growth. Upon planning to put up posters with pictures of starving children at the mall during Christmas, he realizes how uneducated on the topic he is and what a bad idea it was.

Back to Ramona. The best part of this novel for me was her nemesis telling her off:

"You just have to make sure everybody knows that you are so special and so weird." She tilts her head higher. "Everything you do, your haircuts and your stupid boots, it's all about proving that you're so fucking unusual. You say that you don't care what people think, but you do. You probably spend more time on your appearance than I do. You act like you're this tortured and misunderstood outcast, but you're really not, okay? You've got friends, and your hair looks like something from a Teen Vogue 'How to Get That Punk Rock Look' column. So get over yourself, Ramona, 'cause we're all sick of hearing about what a unique snow-flake you are." (93).

Ramona briefly ponders if she really is a poseur but forgets about this instance fairly quickly which I thought was a wasted opportunity for growth. Eventually the two sort of patch things up, but not before this encounter:

"You are unbelievable. You're like a five-year old! Didn't your mother teach you to share?" I said.

"My mother is dead, you bitch," she said.

And I was so surprised,

that I said,

"Mine too." (126)

It was a part where I might have honestly groaned in frustration. I honestly could not understand why Ramona had to make it about herself?

Maybe this book just wasn't for me.

I did enjoy Nowlin's style of writing when characters would break into a sort of poetic thought process. Like the above quote, there's more than a handful of sections broken off like that and I think it was the right balance to regular prose. I wish there had been more conflict in this novel, and looking back on it, I'm not sure if there really was any major conflict at all. I wish Nowlin would have touched more on the polyamory relationship the three had going on. Maybe in a sequel?