LO FI

An unmoored 23-year-old navigates the dazzling, grungy Nashville music scene.

Alison Hunter has just arrived in Nashville after graduating from the University of Michigan; her parents are missionaries in Korea, so her only familial tether to Tennessee is her bohemian aunt Izzy. Al lives with her bold best friend, Sloane, and stamps wrists at the door of a historic club called The Venue, where artists like Leonard Cohen and The Shins have performed. Al is still reeling from a recent embarrassment: a failed open mic performance, sung totally out of tune. She wants to be a musician, but she’s encountering persistent writer’s block, unable to come up with her own melodies to fit the angsty lyrics she’s writing. She’s haunted by a former flame from Michigan, an up-and-coming artist named Nick in a band called Flirtation Device; he won’t give her the time of day, except when it’s convenient for him, and he comes floating in and out of Nashville without any warning. As Al works alongside the brooding, mysterious Julien at the door and The Venue’s sexy bartender, Colt, she must navigate her complicated relationship to all three men. Lonely and hurting, Al spirals in a series of self-destructive behaviors. Set in what seems like the visual and musical aesthetic of the early 2010s—Hot Topic, beanies, Warped Tour, physical CDs, Vampire Weekend, Facebook—Riggs’ novel is vital, electric. Al is magnetic, and readers will root for her, eagerly following her triumphs and her heartaches. The story works best as an examination of young adulthood: of the forces that ground or unsettle people, and the climactic moments that demand introspection. Less successful is Riggs’ commitment to voicing a version of musicality through her prose; the story is peppered with clunky, contrived metaphors—a paper cut “as thin as the high E string on the guitar” and a box sticking out of a bag “like an extra syllable that doesn’t fit the rhythm of a song.”

A dynamic rock song of a novel from an exciting debut author.