If the film Stand By Me got knocked up by a John Mellencamp song in it’s dad’s Dodge pickup, you’d have Shotgun Lovesongs. And I mean that in the best kind of way. This book combines two of my favorite things, a commentary on American life and a bittersweet coming of age story.
Nickolas Butler’s debut was the best book I read last year. The title stood out to me on a store shelf, then the description lured me in. I love some good old fashioned Americana, and I guess heartland heartbreak is a strand of that DNA.
The novel centers around four friends who’ve grown up together in Little Wing, Wisconsin, a town so small that Minneapolis seems a metropolis in comparison.
- Reliable, heart-of-gold Henry, a struggling farmer who’s married to Beth
- Ronny, who’s been the sweet local idiot since his rodeo accident
- Kip, the money-grubbing douchebag of the group (every group needs one?)
- Lee, a world-famous musician whose character was supposedly inspired by Bon Iver
The minute the characters first made me smile was when Henry and Beth met up with Lee and his movie star girlfriend before Kip’s wedding. They ended up getting high, losing track of time and breaking a few traffic laws to get to the venue on time.
Somewhere early on, as Beth and Henry prepare to head to New York for Lee’s big fat celebrity wedding, she wonders if he could have written a song about her. Later, in a chapter narrated by Lee, he reveals his entire debut album, Shotgun Lovesongs, was about Beth.
It’s not until the very end that we realize the depth of Lee’s feelings for Beth, and that he’s actually the one who fell harder after their one night stand. But the book is more than a melodrama with a cheesy love triangle. It’s about the choices people make in their lives, the realities they settle for, the fallouts and reconciliations, and the way you’re always drawn back home, no matter how badly you wanted to escape it way back when.
Favorite quote:
Melancholy is such a dramatic sounding word, but sometimes it’s the right one. When you’re feeling both a little happy and a little sad; it’s the feeling that most people experience at a high school graduation I suppose, or watching their child board a school bus for the first time. The night before Henry and Beth’s wedding, that’s exactly what I felt – melancholy.
Leave a Reply