Signal to Noise

by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

[empressbrooke]

I liked this one. It went by very quickly and I kept looking forward to picking it up again each evening. I liked the connection between music and magic, and I liked how the present-day snippets made me curious to keep reading about the 1988 plot. What happened at the end of 1988 that led to Meche moving away and not talking to her best friends ever again? However, there were a couple things that kept me from tipping from "like" to "love." The main character is just such a mean kid, and it doesn't seem like her present-day adult version grew up any in the intervening years. I read enough YA that teenaged angst doesn't bother me (in fact, it's refreshing when YA teens act like teens, they're so often larger than life heroes that save the day), but this went beyond that into some pretty intense meanness. And seeing that meanness reflected in the adult-Meche chapters didn't feel like good character development. Aside from that, it contains one of my biggest pet peeves in storytelling - the grown adults who are still madly in love with someone they last saw in high school. Like, if you're over the age of 30 and you haven't met any fully formed adult humans who interest you more than someone who has remained a 15 year old in your memory, you are just creepy.