“Sounds Like Love” has Joni Lark (yes that is her name) feeling out of sorts while at a concert listening to a singer sing one of the songs that she wrote. Joni is a song-writer though lately she hasn’t been writing anything. Instead she partly dreads and is looking forward to returning to her hometown in North Carolina to spend time with her family and best friend. Joni though realizes that not only is her family and friends, and the musical hall her family owns different, so is she. She now has a voice in her head that is apparently attached to a man she has never met named Sasha.
So this ends up dragging pretty bad throughout the novel. Even when you have Joni and Sasha meet, the book drags. I think it’s because Poston didn’t really know how to end this one or what the central conflict really was at the core. I think that we needed way more time with Joni and Sasha. I wanted to fall for them, and the whole thing with them being in each other’s heads should have been fun and even romantic. But it didn’t really work. I will say the reveal of the why and how behind the song was great. But it doesn’t work since there was no build-up to it at all. Maybe if that part of the story that was left untold had been added in the end it could have worked. It’s just very glaring after the reveal that then maybe the book would have hit all the sweet spots.
The other characters really didn’t get developed IMHO, outside of Joni’s mother. The other characters, Joni’s best friend, her brother, and father are just stiff throughout the book.
I did like the book exploring what happens when you leave home for “something better” and the homesickness that follows. But I really wish that Poston had followed that thought the whole way through the book. Sometimes you have to leave home and it may suck, but it felt like at the end Joni had just gotten a life that she thought would be better for her since she was afraid of moving forward.
I read this for CBR17bingo, “Arts” since the book does focus on art in terms of music and songwriting. This fills row 5, square 1.