Reading The Final Revival of Opal and Nev is like reading a fictional episode of VH1’s Behind the Music and a Rolling Stone feature rolled up and told from the modern perspective of a Black woman navigating her own identity and history, with incisive racial and political commentary not present in most mainstream rock reviews and retrospectives.

It’s so realistic that it is easy to forget that Opal and Nev and Virgil and Bob Hize and the Bond Brothers and all the others never actually existed. This book is also so wonderfully dramatic that imagining the characters as actors comes naturally. The dialogue leaps from the page, each character larger than life and simultaneously relatable. (I kept reading Virgil LeFleur’s lines in Billy Porter’s voice in my head, for instance.)

This book reminded me quite a bit of Evelyn Hugo in the way the frame story is about a journalist writing a book about a reclusive famous person and seeking the truth of what happened to her father through that process. What I think this book does better than Evelyn Hugo is broach the topic of race and identity in America with nuance and vigor. The story is simultaneously in the 1970s and also very contemporary. The perspectives of the main characters are multifaceted and nuanced, and Opal is so much aware and active in her position as a provocateur and activist than Evelyn is.

Recommended for fans of rock music, American history, Behind the Music, the movie Almost Famous, journalistic narratives and realistic fiction.

CW: racism, sexism, racist slurs, mentions of sexual violence, assault, death, drug use and addiction, job loss, cancer, infidelity, police brutality