May 20, 2024
Riggs’s lusty first novel follows an aspiring singer-songwriter in Nashville’s booze-soaked music scene during the mid-2000s. Shortly after graduating from the University of Michigan, Alison “Al” Hunter takes a job working the door at a hip Nashville club called The Venue. On the surface, she seems to be having a good time scoring drinks, drugs, sex, and guest list spots, but underneath she’s full of melancholy. Her old college flame Nick, lead singer of a buzzy new band, has pretty much moved on from her, and she’s struggling to write songs after a disastrous open-mic performance a month earlier. The plot thickens when Nick shows up at The Venue one stormy night, though it leads to a predictable denouement concerning Al’s determination to find her own voice. Riggs is best in her sardonic depictions of her protagonist’s milieu, delineating Nashville’s desperate strivers, hipster know-it-alls, and slick industry insiders, all of whom are outnumbered by the huge crowds that show up for cover bands (“People are suckers for nostalgia, for the VH1 days, for getting drunk with a purpose on an otherwise dreary night”). Music lovers will devour this. Agent: Andrianna deLone, CAA.
June 1, 2024
An unmoored 23-year-old navigates the dazzling, grungy Nashville music scene. Alison Hunter has just arrived in Nashville after graduating from the University of Michigan; her parents are missionaries in Korea, so her only familial tether to Tennessee is her bohemian aunt Izzy. Al lives with her bold best friend, Sloane, and stamps wrists at the door of a historic club called The Venue, where artists like Leonard Cohen and The Shins have performed. Al is still reeling from a recent embarrassment: a failed open mic performance, sung totally out of tune. She wants to be a musician, but she's encountering persistent writer's block, unable to come up with her own melodies to fit the angsty lyrics she's writing. She's haunted by a former flame from Michigan, an up-and-coming artist named Nick in a band called Flirtation Device; he won't give her the time of day, except when it's convenient for him, and he comes floating in and out of Nashville without any warning. As Al works alongside the brooding, mysterious Julien at the door and The Venue's sexy bartender, Colt, she must navigate her complicated relationship to all three men. Lonely and hurting, Al spirals in a series of self-destructive behaviors. Set in what seems like the visual and musical aesthetic of the early 2010s--Hot Topic, beanies, Warped Tour, physical CDs, Vampire Weekend, Facebook--Riggs' novel is vital, electric. Al is magnetic, and readers will root for her, eagerly following her triumphs and her heartaches. The story works best as an examination of young adulthood: of the forces that ground or unsettle people, and the climactic moments that demand introspection. Less successful is Riggs' commitment to voicing a version of musicality through her prose; the story is peppered with clunky, contrived metaphors--a paper cut "as thin as the high E string on the guitar" and a box sticking out of a bag "like an extra syllable that doesn't fit the rhythm of a song." A dynamic rock song of a novel from an exciting debut author.
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July 1, 2024
Recent college graduate Alison works the door at The Venue in Nashville, when she's not partying with her roommate, Sloane, or trying to write her own songs. The Venue keeps her close to music and her rag-tag fellow staff, including bartender/drug-dealer/easy-hookup Colt and fellow door person Julien, who's always reading books and seeming very serious. The Venue also brings in acts like Flirtation Device, whose front man, Nick, is Alison's white-hot flame when they're in the same place, which is rare. Riggs' first novel is divided into four sides, like a double mixtape, and Alison includes several playlists, like ""melodies that have been stuck in my head"" and ""songs so aching you can only listen to them once a year."" Alison is a person in progress, floundering one minute and confident the next, and Nashville is her place: ""the kind of place you come to be known--whatever that means to you."" Readers should pick this up for its boozy, bluesy atmosphere; Riggs' well-wrought, insider-feeling Nashville music scene; and Alison's uber-confessional narration.
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