Rainey, the main character of Burlington-based Benjamin Roesch‘s debut YA novel Blowin’ My Mind Like a Summer Breeze, is a musician by design rather than by choice. She has spent years playing in the band as her once-famous R&B musician parents tour well past their glory days of the ’70s in a run-down RV. The book takes place in the ’90s, allowing for the premise that their teenage offspring now round out the group: big brother Walden on drums, Rainey on keyboards and vocals.
Rainey has been on board for this default ride for a long time, but at 15, life on the road has lost its luster. “I love music more than anything,” she says, “but sometimes I feel like a character in a fairy tale who doesn’t realize she was born in a prison until she tries to go outside for the first time and the guards stop her at the door.” She dreams of staying put, going to school, holding a part-time job, having some friends for a change. Better yet, how about a little privacy?
Roesch captures the elusive magic of the creative process beautifully.
Enter Juliet. As the daughter of the owners of the resort where Rainey’s family is headlining, she has her own unusual upbringing to contend with. Juliet’s childhood bedroom is a literal hotel suite, which comes with personal space in spades. Each girl is enamored of the other’s lifestyle and disenchanted with her own. Rainey is immediately intoxicated by Juliet, and the scene is set for a coming-of-age romance.
The girls have only a week together before the gig is over, but it’s the kind of life-altering week that YA novels were created to chronicle. Juliet has a much sharper edge than Rainey, who displays an interesting combination of maturity from being homeschooled and touring with the band mixed with naïveté from the sheltering that her close-knit family life has provided. Juliet challenges her in ways that are both exciting and confusing, and Rainey is pushed to think more for herself than she is used to. When Juliet offers Rainey a cigarette, for example, the interaction isn’t as straightforward as it might seem.
“What, you’ve never had a puff?”“Never,” I say, but she frowns as if she doesn’t believe me.
“Aren’t you a little bit curious?” She holds her cigarette out to me. “C’mon. Try it.” And for some reason, I can’t deny it, I am a little bit curious. There’s something magnetic in her eyes that I’m drawn toward. I reach out, but just before she’s about to hand it to me, Juliet pulls the cigarette back and frowns at me, shaking her head.
“That was a test,” she says, “and you failed miserably.”
She actually sounds kind of mad. I’m so confused.
Not surprisingly, Rainey racks up a lot of “firsts” during her time with Juliet, marking them — as well as other milestones throughout the book — with lists to which she gives names such as “Things I Did for the First Time When I was Fifteen,” “Things My Mom Hates About Me” and “Things I Like About Juliet.”
The book is split fairly evenly into two halves: the brief interlude with Juliet, “Side One: A Week on Lake Michigan, July, 1995”; and the narrative of the year that follows, “Side Two: The Treehouse Tapes, August 1995-August 1996.” The structure is a nice commentary on the wavy nature of temporal perspectives, as a week can feel like a lifetime and a year can go by in a flash, especially when that year is packed to the gills with transformative moments.
We see Rainey come into her own, not only as a young adult but as an evolving artist. In several scenes in which Rainey begins to write her own songs, Roesch captures the elusive magic of the creative process beautifully.
Given the overarching theme of music, the labeling of sections and chapters of the book as “Sides” and “Tracks” is a clever device. The only hiccup in that structure is Track Zero (aka the prologue). On its own, it is an intriguing beginning, but I want a prologue that exists for a reason, offering information the reader needs to be clued in to for a specific purpose, and that doesn’t seem to be the case here. More to the point, the story might have been better served by not giving readers a heads-up about the relationship between the two girls, so that we could have watched it unfold rather than seeing it as a fait accompli.
Too many adults pepper the story for my YA palate, but the important relationships are well drawn and skillfully portrayed. Mother and daughter grapple with an angsty tension — exacerbated by Rainey’s desire to split the scene — which evolves nicely throughout the story arc. Likewise, the author creates a believable dynamic between father and daughter, with their inside jokes and nicknames. In some spots, Dad’s story line threatens to eclipse Rainey’s, as his increasing bouts of stage fright morph into something more serious and she is pulled into a codependent cycle. But this is a family whose members all look out for one another, refreshing in YA fiction, a category in which parents and kids are so often pitted against each other from the outset.
In short, there is a lot to love here. If you are a fan of YA, ’90s music and stories about creativity, Blowin’ My Mind Like a Summer Breeze will be a lovely ride.
From Blowin’ My Mind Like a Summer Breeze
Moving quickly, but not too quickly, as if I have a bubble balanced on the tip of my finger, I pick up Walden’s guitar and sit down on the edge of the bed. Using the white pick threaded through the top three strings, I strum until I find the chords that go with the melody I’ve been singing. The guitar is slightly out of tune, but who cares? A minor. D minor. G major. I’m not much of a guitar player so my chords are pretty chunky and a little sloppy. But I kind of like it that way.
Over and over, I play those chords, messing with the strum pattern, looking for a transition point, a way I can pivot out of this drone. I find it when my fingers stumble on a B diminished chord, then I go from E minor to F major, then to F minor, which opens a back door to cycle back to A minor and where I started.
Humming the melody on a loop so it won’t change shape, or simply drift away into the ether that produced it, stopping only long enough to get my journal out of my backpack, I furiously scribble down the words as they tumble out of my brain, too seized by the moment to even consider messing with the alien musical forces that have taken possession of my body.
The original print version of this article was headlined “A Star Is Born”
This article appears in Oct 12-18, 2022.
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