Everyone knows the phrase about a book being so good that the reader “couldn’t put it down.” Wreck Your Heart is one of those books. Written in the first person from the perspective of local bar-working, guitar-wielding country singer Dahlia, Wreck Your Heart is part love song, part family mystery, and part Chicago caper. Through the people she meets and scenarios she encounters, Dahlia has to make big decisions about whether forgiveness is worth it and the consequences of hard-earned redemption.
With one hell of a past that unfolds throughout the course of the narrative, our protagonist hasn’t seen her mother Marisa in 20 years and doesn’t want to – until she has no choice when Marisa shows up at the bar. “Everything about me that was broken, I could trace back to her.” Despite Dahlia’s turbulent life, she has cobbled together friends, bandmates, and a place to live thanks to her guardian Alex. Each week she performs for the bar crowd wearing “enough spangles to make an audience see God or go blind.” I can see her on stage.
For all her rough edges and heartache, Dahlia is incredibly self-aware: “I wore other people’s clothes and lived in other people’s homes and sang other people’s songs. I put on other people’s lives. It was easier than living my own.” She definitely understands her situation but goes back and forth between feeling sorry for herself and resolving to make her life better. Dahlia is a fighter.
Author Lori Rader-Day is clearly a country music fan and knows how to tell a story about hard luck people who create their own families in the places they have turned into home. “A good country song, a true one, no matter how many chords it uses, no matter how rustic or slickly produced, sang to the inside of you and burst you wide open, lashed you raw and brand-new, and left you thinking of all the hurt you’d survived.” Wow. In addition to gems like that, Rader-Day seamlessly weaves bits and pieces of song lyrics throughout the story which of course I love.
Usually I write a review and then list my favorite quotes but since every other page of this book features narrative-defining quotes, it’s hard to choose. In fact, I almost need to let the quotes outline the review because the book’s diction is some of the best I’ve ever read:
“The guy didn’t know how close to the surface my every emotion was.”
“Outside, the wind had teeth.”
“A Dolly Parton album that couldn’t be had for love or money.”
“Singing songs about broken hearts and empty pockets.”
“I went around half-recognizing people.”
“The audience doesn’t know what it wants, until you show them.”
“A city with its heart on its sleeve.”
“We were both feeling some kind of way about it.”
“She’s already made me bulletproof.”
“I had built armor out of the memories that made me grateful she was gone.”
“Writing my own songs costs me something I don’t always have.”
“Man, I hoped I was still in progress.”
“I was so tired, my sluggish thoughts were nearly physical things I could reach out and snatch out of the air.”
“Family made itself out of whatever materials it found. Out of scraps, if necessary. Out of strays.”
“It was all such guesswork, being a human.”
“We’d decided to find out who we were, one song at a time.”
One interesting aspect of the book is that Dahlia addresses the reader directly – and I’m not sure how I feel about it. Also, the color blue is a main theme that runs through the narrative as it is synonymous with what home means to our main character. Overall, Dahlia is a sympathetic protagonist, especially since her past breaks my heart. The fact that she’s not the first to want to help people lends to what she endured, but her ability to still find ways to move forward is what keeps the pages turning.
Another interesting thread is how, because she hasn’t seen her mother since she was six years old, the bulk of her memories are that of a little kid. Those parts almost offer a second perspective from the same character and reading how she reconciles her memory with reality is fascinating. “My version of the story of my own life was wrecked, and if I couldn’t be sure of even my own experience, I didn’t know who I was.” What a realization for someone so young who has already lived through too much.
I don’t want to ruin the story – because it’s a good one – but for those who love music, understand that family looks different for everyone, and realize that “music is a frontier, an unmapped country,” this book is worth reading. Also, I would love to see Wreck Your Heart made into a television series (similar to Daisy Jones) or a movie.
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