This was almost a 5 star read for me. The Mitchell voice I click with so often is here, though at the start I actually wasn’t with it, and stepped back for a bit. When I returned it was on and I proceeded at normal pace. Sometimes slowly down even, I was enjoying it so much.

This is the story of a band in the 60s that never was. It collected orphans—of all sorts—both in the fiction, specifically, and abroad, ranging the Mitchell-verse/Uber novel/meta novel, etc etc. whatever you’d like to label it.

When firing on all cylinders, the fiction mixes the bands present with their past on aptly names LPs of tracks, being each character in the band, with side one and side twos. It’s an interesting remix of Mitchell’s short story novellas that comprise the chapters and stack to the larger story being told. It’s thematically on point and satisfying. It’s absolutely fantastic at characterization.

It also creates some peaks and valleys, though. There feels like fluff occurring after we establish the backstories for those pertinent members. Interestingly, the truths this tells, being the real bands and people and sometimes events, don’t quite do their job. Usually you stuff the truth in so when the lies hit the reader suspends disbelief and doesn’t notice the buttressing. But with all stories like this I find that the stuffing shows. Name dropping sounds like name dropping. It feels like an agenda is had. And here it is decidedly very rose-coloured in its glasses, imo.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s fun. Especially Cohen and Joplin. But stories like this are so ubiquitous it’s hard to avert your gaze from what’s to come. The ending has its inevitably, which you want…. But it does lack any surprise. Had this been truncated somewhat I’d have likely not noticed as much. But as is, we spend a lot of time on a particular person and it is the personification of the story of this time, the character that is this person, and the lesson we have probably already internalized.

However. This hits 5 stars multiple times. One of which is a particular crossover with our man De Zoet. Spoilers abound from here on out—you have been warned—trespass not :|

There is a significant revelation in this that ties into The Thousand Autumns and it is very, very cool. A huge high. There are things left uncodified in that story that left me wanting. This ALSO crossed with Number9dream and Ghostwritten, with a particular Mongolian—whom, I learned, is not Dr. Marnius, nor Xi Lo! Very cool. But also, who the F is this fellow then?? An unaffiliated atemporal being, apparently

But wait! Even more world building occurs: Enomoto has been imprinted in Ze Zoet since Thousand Autumns, across Generations. Making a case for generational memory and trauma and how that works in this world.

Then, there is also Luisa Rey’s storyline colliding with our Elf here, in spectacularly queer ways. It’s a lovely crossroads and it is not specifically mentioned that Elf’s wife at the end is her, but we assume so. Why isn’t it specified though, one wonders?

Black Swan Green, we have a Bolivar character that may be our young protagonist? I believe? If I recall correctly!

There is the Hershey connection from Bone Clocks. There’s the appearance of a wild Cloud Atlas sextet. The only thing not tied in directly is Slade House, possibly. But really, this is the first book I’ve read where you get something—sometimes Large things—out of reading all the other books and that was wicked.

As I said. So close to 5 stars. If not for some fluff and the larger Dean storyline going as it did, I think it would have been.