Rock Star Superstar (Blake Nelson, 2004)
I loved Blake Nelson's Girl, and had been meaning to get around to Rock Star Superstar for a while. Nelson stuck with Portland as a setting, but this time around the protagonist is a boy. Pete is really similar to Andrea from Girl. He's not super cool and doesn't seem to understand what's going on around him most of the time and they seem really self-conscious. That aspect of Nelson's characters bugs me because I don't remember being that naive as a teen. Don't we all judge kids through the lense of how we remember ourselves? I do. What Nelson gets so right are teen relationships. The way Pete's relationship with Margaret begins was so familiar to me. You know how you'd just kind of fall into dating somebody because you sat with them on the bus one day, got seated together in class, or even ran into them at the mall? That part of the story seemed really organic.
The big story here is that Pete's a musician, and because his dad is kind of a hands-off parent, can pretty much devote himself completely to music and skate by in school with no plans for college or the future, beyond playing music. I thought the local-band-makes-good story would be unrealistic, but it worked for me. I don't think I'm spoiling anything by telling you that Pete doesn't get famous by the end of the book, which kept the story grounded in reality. I think this book would appeal to both boys and girls equally. If I was a youth librarian, I'd probably try to sell Girl to a boy if he liked this one. I'll have to check out The New Rules of High School, Nelson's latest.
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