Days of Rock & Roll

Days of Rock & Roll is a 2018 thriller novel by Kelly Holm.  It was published in July of 2018 by the author. I was provided with an advanced copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

The story follows a photopgrapher named Ariana who argees to photograph her ex-boyfriend Zak’s band while they’re on tour for a magazine. The pair had a bad break-up many years ago and Zak intends to use Ariana’s assignment as a chance to win her back. Ariana, despite their break-up, hasn’t gotten over Zak as much as she claims and just wants to get through the job as quickly as possible. Complicating both exes plans is the presence of a Hollywood starlet who has decided Zak is hers and a shady figure from Ariana’s past that’s not willing to let her go. When Ariana disappears, Zak does everything he can to find her.

First, let’s begin by discussing the characters in this story. Ariana is one of the point of view characters and one of the two main characters. Ariana is one of my favorite main characters in a while. She’s not a reader-insert type character, she’s her own person and is dripping with personality. Not only that, but she has her own goals, and her own agency, which characters in some stories like this tend to lack. When she finds herself in a dangerous situation, she doesn’t just let things happen to her, but at the same time, she’s smart about how she reacts to things. I was rooting for Ariana from beginning to end in this story. The other main character is, of course, Zak, the guitarist of the world-famous band Dark Horse and Ariana’s ex. I feel a little less favorably towards Zak than I do Ariana, which is mostly because of a few things he does early in the story. He clearly has his own plans, and demons and things going on, but I found myself getting annoyed with him in parts. Rick is Ariana’s boyfriend, who she breaks up with very early in the syory because she thinks he’s too clingy. I hate Rick. Every reader is supposed to hate Rick. At first, I thought he was just going to be an obsessive ex who causes some problems for Ariana because he’s mad they broke up, but it turns out to be that he’s part of some very dark things. Rick is, undoubtedly, the villain of this story. Jules is Ariana’s sister and manager. I expected her to be a side character at first, mostly existing for Ariana to talk about her conflicted feelings for Zak, and not much else. Then, Rick becomes very embittered by their break-up and Jules becomes one of the most important characters in the entire story. The last character to discuss is Josie Winters, the Hollywood starlet who’s decided she and Zak are going to be together, no matter what. She starts off as an annoyance, and continues to be an annoyance, up until the very end of the story where she goes completely off the rails. Like Rick, we as the readers are meant to dislike her. The story is, on its surface, about Zak trying to get Ariana back so any character that threatens the happy ending needs to come off as unlikeable.

The actual writing in Days of Rock & Roll is great. The author does a fantastic job of mixing telling information to the reader with properly displaying it. There’s enough detail being shared for the reader to get into the story and the setting without it being overkill. We know what all of the characters look like, and the places that they are, without it seeming like the author wanted to explain every single object in the room a character is in. There are a few minor mistakes, but nothing that made me want to stop reading. I’ll discuss the pacing in a little bit, but Holm did a fantastic job building tension in the right places. In the climax of the story, when Rick’s almost cornered and Ariana’s almost safe, I wasn’t completely sure if the plan to save her would actually work. I enjoy that in a story. Characters need to struggle, especially in the final confrontation. They need to fail, or get tricked, and here that’s what happened. It’s a very well written book from a character and emotional perspective, but has room for improvement where the plot is concerned.

The pacing of the novel is a little uneven, which in turn makes the plot a little hard to follow and jarring in some places. More than half of the book is about Ariana and Zak remembering the beginning of their relationship and what happened during their break-up, while they also go back and forth about what feelings they still have. A lot of these scenes have the awkward “I’m talking to my ex” feel that gets interrupted by one external factor or another, usually Josie showing up and insisting that she’s dating Zak. The Ariana-Zak drama is broken up by Josie plotting how to “make Zak hers” and Rick getting increasingly angry and frustrated about Ariana dumping him until he goes as far as to kidnap her sister to find out where she is. After he kidnaps Jules, he kidnaps Ariana and that’s the point where the story takes a very hard left turn that had me thinking “what am I reading?”. Rick, it turns out, is nowhere near the person who Ariana thought he was. She broke up with him because he was a little boring, and very clingy. After their break-up and he starts to spiral, it comes to light that he’s a very, very bad person and that he’s not going to stop until he gets what he wants and he doesn’t care who gets hurt or dies because of it. Until this happens, the main antagonist looks to be Josie, who absolutely will not leave Zak alone, and she’s then more or less sidelined until after Rick is dealt with.

I think the root of my criticism about Rick’s actions seeming to come out of nowhere is the lack of foreshadowing. During the first few scenes with him, he seems like just an angry ex-boyfriend. I expected him to chase after Ariana, possibly stalk her. Maybe he gets into a confrontation with Zak because he refuses to accept that they broke up. Then, he kidnaps Jules and it seems like he’s starting to unravel, and a little dangerous, but not a serious threat to Ariana. He then abducts her, and the reader learns his backstory, which is much darker than anyone expected. (I should mention that I can see some problematic elements in Rick’s backstory and motivations. I don’t believe in spoiling major plot points unnecessarily, so I won’t get to in depth, but Rick’s motives, philosophy and especially his behvaior once he thinks he’s “won” create a stereotypical, and damaging image of the culture he’s a part of.) The problem is that Rick, his skills, his connections, et cetera, seem to come out of nowhere. There’s no mention of a mysterious job early on that indicates there’s more to him than appears. Ariana never mentions finding anything off or strange about him. And outside of one character saying Ariana and Rick didn’t make sense as a couple, or a friend of hers saying she never really like him but couldn’t explain why, there’s no indication or foreshadowing that things with Rick are going to get as intense as they do. I don’t like major plot elements spelled out for me, but I also don’t like feeling that they come from absolutely nowhere.

As I mentioned earlier, Josie seems like she might be the main antagonist until Rick turns out to be a complete monster. Josie just seems to be conniving and manipulative. She wants to date Zak, not because she has real feelings for him but because she wants him to make her famous. Her logic is that, if she marries someone super famous, she’ll be super famous too. She doesn’t like Zak, but she loves what he could do for her. She’s even willing to commit fraud and blackmail in order to make him be with her. Her plan of course, makes no sense and blows up in her face, but it was strange to me how much emphasis was placed on her and her plans when they only seemed to have a secondary impact on the plot.

Now that I’ve discussed my biggest criticisms of the story, let me just touch on a few other things I want to mention. I said earlier that the pacing is a little weird, this is because there isn’t a clear divider between one POV and another if its not in between chapters. The same can be said for transitions between Ariana’s memories of her relationship with Zak and the present events. One paragraph, she’s in Berlin five years ago, and the next she’s getting off of the plane in Detroit in the present. Something as simple as a break in between paragraphs would’ve made the transition less jarring.

Days of Rock & Roll is a good book, but the last third or so of it doesn’t seem to fit with the rest. The main conflict sort of comes out of nowhere and it makes a book with very little tension up to that point suddenly become incredibly serious. I can’t decide if the author wanted to write an abduction story and framed the whole “exes reuniting” idea around it, or if she wanted to write about two exes reuniting and then found a way to include the kidnapping plot. In either case, it’s not well-executed, which is a shame because I liked the beginning of the story, and I like the actual kidnapping plot, but they didn’t really work together. I’d recommend this book to others, but not without warning other readers that the conflict seems to come out of nowhere.

Rating: 3.6 stars

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