Joni Lark wants to create the melodies that get stuck in your head…and your heart.
Her hometown has always given her surf, sand, and inspiration. But when her parents decide to close the family music venue, Joni’s life begins to fall off key – she couldn’t possibly write another song. Until a melody comes to her, half-formed, and with an imagined voice that she can’t forget.
But when the very real, very aggravating man behind the voice shows up in Vienna Shores – Joni can no longer deny their inexplicable telepathic connection.
To get out of each other’s heads, they’ll have to finish the song haunting them both. But there’s just one problem – they can’t agree on anything – and if they don’t change their tune, it might just end in heartbreak first…
I’ve read all of Ashley’s books and this is the newest. They’re quirky little romances with supernatural twists.
And I’ll get this in now. It became painfully obvious the ex-boy band member, Sebastian Fell, was Harry Styles. On page 230, it explains everything. He joined the band, Renegade, at 16. Had his face on merch a year later, toured the world long before he could vote, and made a name for himself with his one-night stands and found himself on the cover of Page Six. And we have the line, “while he was off dating every Taylor and Olivia and Sabrina in Hollywood.” One Direction is also mentioned in this book.
It’s funny how much I think it’s cheesy when I read it in other people’s books, yet I did it myself. So I can’t really complain about it when I used Harry, Olivia, and her ex, Jason Sudeikis for the characters in my book, Anything for You.
Onto the book.
Sounds Like Love is about Joni Lark, a songwriter living in Los Angeles who heads home for a month of summer vacation to Vienna Shores in North Carolina.
She finds out that her parents are closing the Revelry, their long dead bar that had been in the family for seventy years, and has a hard time coming to terms with losing a big part of her life.
This is on top of seeing her mother’s dementia in real time, and how her father deals with it.
She’s losing both. Her mother and the family history.
After the supernatural story of her and Sebatian’s co-writing comes to its natural conclusion, Joni decides Vienna Shores is where she wants to be again. She wants to come home, and she wants the Revelry. At this stage, the onset of her mother’s medical condition is lightly, and lovingly, covered.
Towards the end, when the onset of dementia grew to the point of no return, I blubbered like a baby. Combining this with Joni’s best friend, Gigi, having dreams and wanting to get out of town to fulfill them cut close to the bone.
Being envious of Joni because Joni did get out of town to pursue her dreams is an envy I know all too well.
I am stuck here. With a mother who doesn’t give a damn about me. Who abuses me and thinks it’s perfectly all right while living in her own little narcissistic world. The world that is in her own head, the world she will probably live in for the rest of her life, while her muddled brain grows worse, and probably leads to some form of dementia or other brain incapacitating disease. It’s either that, or really is just the narcissistic world in which she chooses to live.
Meanwhile, I never got to go off and follow my dreams. I was never encouraged; I was never supported. I never had the guts to do it. I don’t know where I went wrong. I don’t know when I should have said yes instead of no, or vice versa. Gone left instead of right, and vice versa. Turned around instead of moving ahead. Because not once, did I ever know what the fuck was going on, or do anything about it.
Not once did I ever have the brain power, the will, the guts to follow my dreams, even when they were mocked and unsupported by my mother.
I crumbled, and crumpled into a little emotional ball of a mess, belittled, demeaned, and put down into nothing. Until I was nothing, and no one, and didn’t matter in the whole goddamn scheme of life. And she made that very fucking clear.
Over the years, I have discovered, as a teenager she was popping out kids, by choice. Her first marriage was nothing but a pile of shit that was necessary for the time, and the fact she’d popped out two kids by 18 before her actual marriage.
But, after he killed himself, and it rolled into the ’60s, she took up with another man, bought a house up the hill, and worked at different jobs to feed her five children. She worked at Solar International and Glover Gibbs, and would go out to dances and parties, and take her friends shopping and so much more.
But by the time she hooked up with my father, who was already divorced with two kids, and she popped me out at 33 in 1974, all of that had stopped.
She used to tell me about it. I never realised her age at the time, but in the last couple of years I realised she went from the decade of her teens and popping out kids, to the decade of her 20s and partying and attending dances and running around with her friends, to the decade of her 30s and having me with my father and living in trust houses and dealing with five older kids aged 10-15.
She did all of that in her teens, twenties, and early thirties, and yet…she never once wanted that for me. Never once wanted me to go out with friends and have fun. Never once wanted me to have a boyfriend. She never once encouraged me to do what my five elder siblings had done.
She never seemed to want me to find a life and go off on my own. And, in all fairness, looking back, I don’t think I was emotionally mature enough to do that anyway. But not once did I have support to do…anything.
And so, we come to now.
A life unfulfilled, at fifty-one, and every time I read a book with the little nasty trigger of characters living lives unfulfilled, and parents having brain issues, and death may or may not following, I blubber like a baby at the life I never got to live. Just like the characters in the books, my life too, is fictional and a figment of someone’s imagination.
In Sounds Like Love, Joni had the support of her parents to go off and follow her dreams, but moved back home because she knew it was more important to be there than anywhere else. By the end, Wyn, Joni’s mother, dies, and two years pass. Gigi, who’s dating Joni’s brother Mitch, finally gets to follow her dreams by moving to L.A. after Wyn’s death. And Joni, not only gets the life of her dreams but the man as well.
I give this book 7/10.