Review: The Music of What Happens

The Music of What Happens by Bill Konigsberg
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Trigger warnings for this book: rape, PTSD, abusive parents, mental health issues.

This one's a bit of a tough book for me to rate. I've spent a day after finishing up reading the ARC to let my thoughts collect well enough, and I think I'm going to give it a 3.5 and round up to a 4. I can see why it gets a lot of comparisons to Ari and Dante - the Southwestern setting, a certain retro vibe to it (though it's set in the present day but makes a lot of use of 80s music and an ancient food truck), one tough gay boy and one soft gay boy making an unlikely romance...


But this book, the first Bill Konigsberg book I've ever read, quickly sets itself apart from the object of its inevitable comparison. It's not so minimalist, and it's told in dual POVs, to seek out a strong balance between, as Konigsberg puts it in his author's note at the start, "the sacred masculine and the sacred feminine." Though there's at least one scene that I read and immediately think, that's gotta be an Ari and Dante homage. The one where Max and Jordan go shirtless and start exploring the hills above Phoenix, foraging for prickly pears.

Sweet moments like that make a good portion of the book, but there's also the aforementioned trigger warnings. Both Max and Jordan have traumas and tragedies in their backstories, with Max having been raped by a college guy - and let me tell you, Kevin is one of the most disgusting characters ever put to the page, with a real laundry list of gross acts to his name that I won't get into here - other than to say that, yes, he's racist in addition to being a rapist. This isn't something I'm reading #ownvoices, though I know at least two friends with scarily similar stories to Max's, so take the trigger warnings seriously. (And thanks again, Harry, for giving me them before I picked the book up.)

What strikes a little closer to home for me, though, is Jordan's trauma, where he has to put up with a mother who freaks out at the drop of a hat, can't hold down any job, and always, always, always centers herself whenever anyone else's problems - namely, Jordan's - are brought up. Maybe I don't have all the same troubles he does - my home life's more stable, for one thing - but I do see a lot of my own mother in Jordan's, particularly the emotional abuse and constant self-centering. So I'm glad Jordan's mother's scenes were few and far between, because every time those came up, I found myself cringing harder than any scene where Kevin wasn't involved.

It's funny, though, that while Jordan's chief issue connects more to my own life than Max's, it was Max to which I related more as a character. But that, I'm thinking, might be intentional on Konigsberg's part, to get the reader to explore their own balance of sacred masculine, sacred feminine, and where on the gender expression spectrum they may fall. Like me, I kinda see myself more as a Simon Spier than a Max or a Jordan, not a dudebro, but not really dabbling in makeovers either. Think of the infamous "Okay, maybe not that gay" scene from Love, Simon. But then, I'm not in a place where I can be as open as I'd like to be, and that doesn't help either. If I were more openly bi, I'd probably also be more open to the prospect of expressing myself a bit more feminine just because I can. Hell, I could even work that into my eventual rockstar image were I to move in with Koda and potentially play bass for ChronoWulf. (I do intend to wear rainbow or bi-pride laces on my Doc Martens on stage if that happens.)

Like I said, this book is a tough one, but it's also a short book. So as unmerciful as it can be at times - not unlike that Arizona sun - Max and Jordan's story is pretty well worth the read.

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