St. Rage is a fictional high school punk/pop/garage/country
band led by a girl, Barbara, who thought she was invisible until a guy she
barely knew gave her a hat. She then starts a very long journey of
self-discovery in this coming-of-age novel about music, teenage relationships,
gun violence, and super powers. There’s a touch of the magical realism here,
though I don’t quite see why as it only tends to show up when the author needs
to show how it works. Basically, if Barbara gets angry enough, she can do
things like low level flying, cause car tires to blow out, shoot sparks out of
her finger, and flip someone “the bird” and they will get covered in bird shit.
Her biggest challenge, besides getting a grip on her super powers, is something
way harder than that: making friends. She sings in the church choir and is a
mousy, quiet, easily overlooked teenager living in Seattle. But when Jackson places a hat on her that inspires her
to stand out and be seen. She starts slowly making friends and inviting them to
shows to see real life local bands like Dead Bars, who make several appearances
in the book. So she finally puts together a band and it’s made up of an
indie/folk girl who plays acoustic guitar, a half-Japanese, half-black (I’m
assuming all the other characters are Caucasian, since race never comes up
unless someone is not white) punk rock drummer, the popular girl who bullied
her in middle school on tambourine, and a troubled, depressed teen boy who
brought a gun to school on bass.
The story seems interesting enough, and I do enjoy the occasional young adult
novel (especially with punk band references), though I found myself slogging
through it. None of the characters ever feel well developed, and a lot of the
dialogue feels forced or sometimes comes off as an adult trying to sound like a
teen (“She tends bar on the weekends.” “I’m a little miffed…”). There are
also two queer characters who both start same-sex relationships relatively
easily, which I appreciate the visibility of.
A lot of pieces feel like they’re only there in order to justify them being
included. Like, “I exist, therefore I belong.” So none of the threads feel very
connected for me. And there are infrequent POV shifts that I don’t think are
necessary. Sometimes we get four different POVs of the same exact scene, which
is meant to showcase each character’s personality, but just feels redundant and
confusing.
I realize that I am not the target audience for this book, and I do feel it’s
far too long and the characters felt flat. If you’re interested in test driving
it, Eisenbrey wrote and recorded all the fictional St. Rage songs, which are
available on Bandcamp. It’s certainly an impressive project and a big
undertaking, but definitely fell short of the mark for me. –Kayla Greet (Not A
Pipe Publishing, PO Box 184,
Independence, OR
97351)
DIY punk rock
