A SONG FOR A NEW DAY by Sarah Pinsker – Review

I received this book for free from the Publisher in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

A Song For a New Day by Sarah Pinsker
Published by Berkley on September 10 2019
Genres: Adult, Science fiction
Pages: 384
Format: Finished paperback
Source: Publisher
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The nitty-gritty: Sarah Pinsker’s love of music shines through in this wonderful debut, where two women might just have enough moxie between them to change the world.

I suppose you could call A Song for a New Day dystopian fiction, but it’s unlike any dystopian I’ve ever read. This story is full of hope, and even better, it’s full of hopeful characters. Luce and Rosemary are as different from one another as night and day, but they do have a few important similarities. They both love music, and neither one of them ever gives up. This combination makes for an unusual futuristic story that is less about the science fiction elements and more about the characters and their relationships.

The story switches back and forth between two main characters. Luce is a talented musician, on the cusp of becoming a household name after her song “Blood and Diamonds” takes off. But on the eve of an important live concert, disaster strikes the United States. In the span of an evening, venues all over the country like stadiums and concert halls receive bomb threats, and society begins to crumble. When the threats continue—along with actual bombings—a set of strict laws called the congregation laws go into effect, and people are no longer allowed to come together for things like music concerts, sporting events, or even attend amusement parks or museums. Musicians, unable to legally perform for fans in public, begin to go underground, and secret bars and clubs pop up everywhere. 

At the same time, an insidious viral disease is spreading, claiming the lives of those people who don’t seek medical help soon enough. The combination of the disease and the bomb threats has caused people to become alienated from each other. People rely on “Hoodies,” virtual reality headgear that allows you to “be” with other people, when in reality everyone is safe in their own space.

Told in another timeline, Rosemary is a young woman living in the After—after the bomb threats and the pox swept across the country. She’s lived on her family’s farm her entire life, and at the age of twenty-four has a good job at Superwally, an Amazon-like store where employees work from home and use Hoodies to conduct business with others. Rosemary is a competent customer service representative and retreats to her bedroom each day to do her job. One day, she’s invited by a vendor to attend a virtual concert, something she’s never done before. The concert, an eye-opening experience, show her that there might be life outside of the farm and Superwally, and so she takes a risk and accepts a job as a “talent recruiter” at StageHoloLive, a company that produces live concert experiences in a safe, VR environment.

As you might suspect, Rosemary’s and Luce’s paths will eventually converge, and when they do, things will not go smoothly at all.

Pinsker touches on some important themes in her story, like how one person can start big changes, and no one exemplifies this more than Rosemary. Rosemary is an interesting character. She’s extremely naive when the story begins. She’s never been on a bus, been to a live concert, or stood in a room with a crowd. She’s terrified of being touched, probably because of the danger of disease which still lingers. Rosemary even has panic attacks when she finds herself in a room with a crowd of people for the first time, and I felt terrible for her. And she’s not perfect. She makes plenty of cringe-worthy mistakes, especially when she meets Luce and her band, but she actually learns from those mistakes, which was refreshing. The reader gets to see her gradually change her world view, which was delightful. When she leaves home for the first time, she must navigate new cities where people still gather in public, and her job requires her to seek out and attend illegal music concerts. I loved how much she grows by the end of the book, and even more, I love how organic and natural that change felt.

Luce is also a wonderful character, and I’m so very happy that Pinsker didn’t turn her into a caricature of a rock star. Luce genuinely cares for other people and usually puts others before herself. She has a rocky relationship with her Jewish family, who cannot accept the fact that she’s gay, but she loves and forgives them anyway. And best of all, Luce is consumed by music. She cannot imagine any other life for herself, and she takes risks in order to preserve that life. She has a unique perspective because she’s lived both in the Before and the After, and I love the little details Pinsker adds that show her awareness of how drastically things have changed. In one scene, she and her roommates start a “Don’t Forget Normal” list where they write down everything they remember from Before on the walls of their apartment. It was poignant and heartbreaking.

And of course, there is the music. Pinsker is a musician herself, and her experience adds a unique flavor to the story. Luce’s life on the road, going from gig to gig, isn’t easy at all, but her love of music is powerful enough that she and her fellow musicians will gladly suffer in order to do what they love most. All the details Pinsker adds about lugging heavy instruments around, sleeping in cars, and the blood, sweat and tears of live performances make the experience of being a musician jump off the page, and I could practically hear the thrum of the bass and the squeal of the amps.

I did have some issues with a couple of things. I’ll admit the dueling timelines were confusing in the beginning. It took going back and rereading a few sections to realize that there are about twelve years between the initial bombings and the point where we meet Rosemary. The story seems to go from “today,” what I imagined might be 2019, to the “future” in the blink of an eye, where virtual reality is commonplace and everyone goes around with Hoodies in order to communicate. Self-driving cars are also mentioned in this future, and the superstore Superwally seems to own just about all the market share on anything you need to buy (And the products are all delivered by drone. No need to leave the house!). What would have helped me a lot, and other readers I suspect, would have been a date designation at the beginning of each chapter.

And let’s talk about the Hoodies for a moment. I cannot for the life of me picture what a Hoodie looks like. I love the idea of being able to not only use Hoodies as a separation device from other people, but the ability to literally do anything in “hoodspace” was pretty cool. But is it like a sweatshirt hoodie that you simply pull over your head when you need it? Or is it more like a helmet with a clear plastic cover that protects your face? I need some artists out there to create some fan art for A Song for a New Day so I can see what one looks like!

But in the end, these issues really didn’t matter much. Pinsker doesn’t wrap her story up in a neat little bow at the end, and I was OK with that. Instead, she suggests that perhaps the future is about to change for the better. Rosemary and Luce are both brave enough to take leaps of faith and follow their hearts. A small change could be nothing more than a ripple on the surface of a pond, or it could be a rock that starts an avalanche. I turned the last page with a feeling of hope, and that’s a wonderful feeling to have.

Big thanks to the publisher for supplying a review copy.