Eight titles about the transformative power of live music

M. L. Rio has been an actor, a bookseller, an academic, and a music writer. She holds an MA in Shakespeare studies and a PhD in English literature. She is the author of the internationally bestselling novel If We Were Villains and the USA Today bestselling novella Graveyard Shift. Her new novel is Hot Wax.

At Electric Lit she tagged "eight books [that] showcase how triumphant and transformative live music can be." One title on the list:

Kittentits by Holly Wilson

This is a coming-of-age novel like no other. The ten-year-old narrator, Molly, lives in a Quaker commune in the wake of a fiery tragedy until the arrival of dirt-biking ex-con Jeanie turns her whole world upside-down. Molly’s infatuation with Jeanie is inseparable from Jeanie’s heavy metal anti-heroism, and soon she takes off for Chicago to prove she, too, is a badass and—quite literally—raise the dead.

But the headbanging soundtrack to Molly’s metamorphosis is just one musical element in this raunchy, rollicking carnival ride of a novel; music becomes a secondary language for many of the characters, who fall back on sung verse, spoken lyrics, and even tap dance when more pedestrian forms of self-expression fail them. Wilson’s prose is no different, moving to a weird, wild music entirely its own.

Read about the other entries on Rio's list at Electric Lit.

--Marshal Zeringue