The latest offering from Jessica Adams, Cool For Cats, is a book for all music lovers.
Gutsy, bittersweet and compelling, Cool For Cats is one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in a long time. I won’t go as far as saying Cool For Cats will change your life, but it came close enough for me.
It’s 1979, and Linda Tyler is an anti-establishment rock chick with big dreams, a steady boyfriend and a dead-end job. Linda has just seen the world’s best job advertised in the newspaper – a music journalist for a new magazine called NWW.
It’s a job she wants so badly she knows she will never get it, and throws her application in the bin. Boyfriend David submits the form, and suddenly Linda is part of NWW’s writing staff. From then on, however, things don’t run as smoothly.
Newly single and facing reality, Linda attempts to find herself an apartment while frantically attending late night gigs around London. She also has to cope with her nutty boss making passes at her, while she tries to figure out the sexy Australian photographer, Evan.
Of course, as soon as Linda thinks she’s got it all sorted, who comes back on the scene? David, minus the woman he ditched Linda for in the first place.
It took a little while for me to really get into Cool For Cats, but once I got stuck in, I couldn’t put it down. It got to the point that I would read several chapters on the bus heading to work each day then feel severely nauseous all morning. Even motion sickness did not deter my enthusiasm for this book.
Cool For Cats got me totally amped about music, and I ended up going to a live gig the night I finished the book. Oozing retro-cool, Adams’ descriptions of rock bands and gigs in the late seventies made me nostalgic for an era I wasn’t even alive in.
I also love how Linda’s boss disregards all sorts of bands that we now know became highly successful. He sneers at The Pretenders, dismisses REM’s Michael Stipe and signs on crappy bands with no future.
The heart-wrenching segments between Linda and David make this book much more than just an amusing flashback to the late seventies music scene.
A lot of Linda’s musings about life and love make you take a long hard look at yourself. Adams has a genuine talent for dissecting relationships without being too cheesy.
She tells it like it is, and it’s totally refreshing. I’m not going to give away Cool For Cats’ ending, but it was nothing that I would have predicted, and I liked it. Rock on.
The latest offering from Jessica Adams, Cool For Cats, is a book for all music lovers.