This Song Will Save Your Life

by Leila Sales

[Leah]

For me, making friends is the hardest thing in the world. In many ways – more ways than I would like – I’m a bit like Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory. I’m awkward, I’m a bit inept socially and I conversation just isn’t my forte, especially not with strangers, In some ways, I’m also like Elise Dembowski. I want to make friends, I want to have people to go out with and spend time with, but I just don’t know how to do it and even if I did was Elise did and studied very hard at it, I think you either have the knack or you don’t, and I fear I just don’t have that knack.

This Song Will Save Your Life is nothing like Laila Sales’ past books – I adored Past Perfect because it was so cute and so funny and amazing, but This Song Will Save Your Life is infinitely more emotional, more serious, and it made me sad that Elise felt so lonely, all of the time. It’s how I feel sometimes, but I have a couple of friends from work who I’m sure would be there if I wanted to do anything, I just prefer my own company most of the time. I’m cool with being mid-twenties and in my own company (most of the time) but when you’re a teenager, at school, it’s easy to feel invisible. Easy to wonder if it will ever get better, even if High School is “just five years” of your life, or whatever trope people peddle about school and I definitely felt so bad for Elise, because she was a lovely girl. And the people at her school were just awful.

However the bright spot of the novel was the DJing. I absolutely adored that aspect of the novel, and I loved that Elise was precocious enough to pursue it and get good at it. I’ve never read a novel about a DJ before and I (stupidly) thought it was just playing songs one after the other, so I learned something there as well, which is always pretty cool. It was that one bright spark Elise needed to tell her that life wasn’t so awful, and I enjoyed going on that journey with her. It was so emotional, and a book like this really makes you think about your life and what your days at school were like etc, etc.

This might sound like a somber review – and it is, because the book is somber, but it is also hopeful. I have to be honest and say I wasn’t entirely sure how Elise’s story would end – there’s no typical happy ever after here, if that’s what you’re after, but it worked for the book, it worked for this story. This Song Will Save Your Life may have been poles apart from Past Perfect, but both were fantastic stories in their own right, and it’s nice to read something a bit more emotional for a change. It definitely gave me a lot of feels, and it definitely got me thinking.