All Our Pretty Songs (All Our Pretty Songs #1) by: Sarah McCarry

Title: All Our Pretty Songs (All Our Pretty Songs #1)
Author: Sarah McCarry
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
Shelves: Young Adult, Mythology, Paranormal
Recommended for Fans Of: Neil Gaiman, Tahereh Mafi, Kate Karyus Quinn

Synopsis: Seventeen year old Aurora and her best friend, the narrator, will be together forever. They are not just best friends, but they are like sisters, devoted to each other with a sick attachment. The narrator loves Aurora more than anything, until a tortured musician comes along to steal her away. With his brooding soul and haunting music that sucks the light out of the living, the narrator is taken by him and whirled into a world where the dead come out to play. Aurora and the narrator have always been wild girls, but when the ancient music of love awakens an evil darkness, their friendship may be torn apart and severed forever. Set in a world of sex, drugs and alcohol, these teenagers take the underworld to a whole different level in All Our Pretty Songs.

Review: All Our Pretty Songs sounds like a light, contemporary romance novel, but it is actually quite dark. It is a twisted, deviant story of two girls whose love for each other can only be described as perverse. Aurora and the narrator's friendship go beyond normal and while in real life, this might be described as homosexuality, the author gives no implication of this even resembling their relationship. This leads me to think that the harsh lines that define our society today do not exist in All Our Pretty Songs. The entire story seems to be told in a sleepy, hollow tone that makes it hard for the reader to even picture themselves in Aurora or the narrator's life. In a way, though, this style of writing really worked with the whole plot of the story. I don't think this book really had any definite endings, and the entire plot was kind of blurred and left to a reader's own interpretation. The plot did give me a little trouble sometimes, and none of the characters were very likable at all. Aurora and the narrator both seemed incredibly vapid and vain, and just the setting in All Our Pretty Songs seemed like a completely different world, one where girls fell in love with older boys who appeared out of nowhere; a world where mothers let their children run wild, a world where the unbelievable was excepted without argument or even questioning. This sometimes made me really uncomfortable, but the beautiful writing really made up for it. Sarah McCarry really has a way with words, and the haunting, lyrical way this book was written shows it.

Conclusion: Although this book might make you a little skeptical, it will captivate you with its subjective writing and haunting undertone. All Our Pretty Songs is perfect for a stormy October night, with the wind whistling through the trees outside, while you are sucked into the paralyzing world of The Narrator.

Sometimes, music isn't all that pretty.
xoxo,
Fiction_TheNewReality