Jim Fulner reviewed A Song for a New Day by Sarah Pinsker
I was surprised how much I loved this book
5 stars
This isn't the kind of book I normally read. I received it for a secret SantaThing last year & I assumed I wouldn't like it. I might have been "scared" by the "LGBTQA+ -- Fiction" label, thinking it was going to be filled with sex and stuff. There wasn't any of that.
It was published in 2019, but you could have sworn it was written in the height of the 2020 COVID pandemic.
This near future world where due to terrorist attacks and a deadly virus governments have outlawed gatherings >30 people, and many locations less than that. We get two protagonists: Rosemary Laws, a young adult over 24 who hasn't been out in public since she was a little girl & Luce Cannon, a rising rock star before the whole world got shut down after a baseball stadium blows up and it ends up her last show …
This isn't the kind of book I normally read. I received it for a secret SantaThing last year & I assumed I wouldn't like it. I might have been "scared" by the "LGBTQA+ -- Fiction" label, thinking it was going to be filled with sex and stuff. There wasn't any of that.
It was published in 2019, but you could have sworn it was written in the height of the 2020 COVID pandemic.
This near future world where due to terrorist attacks and a deadly virus governments have outlawed gatherings >30 people, and many locations less than that. We get two protagonists: Rosemary Laws, a young adult over 24 who hasn't been out in public since she was a little girl & Luce Cannon, a rising rock star before the whole world got shut down after a baseball stadium blows up and it ends up her last show was the last live music show in America ever.
Each story is told in first person, intertwined around each other, not always at the same timeline, but with chapters properly labeled so you don't get lost.
Rosemary gets a new job that is outside of "hoodspace" the proprietary virtual reality that has replaced the open internet, and after trying to get a real job Luce takes her one-hit-wonder royalties and start an underground music venue.
Rosemary ends up ruining Luce's life when trying to improve it. But we do end up with a happy ending, even if one reconciliation I was hoping for did not occur.














