While mix tapes are a bit before my time, I have fond memories of cassettes as my first car had a cassette player. I guess you could say that I made mix tapes by making my own playlist and burning a CD, which I would then burn to cassette. Anyway, it’s not the medium but the music that plays a big role in Mix Tape, a story of first love reunited through the power of Twitter and YouTube links to songs. It’s interesting, sweet and has an excellent soundtrack (which of course you can listen to on Spotify).

The story is told through the eyes of Daniel and Alison across two different time periods – their youth in Sheffield in the late 1970s and the current day in both Edinburgh and Australia. Daniel and Alison met as teenagers and fell in love, but Alison was always very protective and secretive when it came to her house and family in a poorer suburb. To Daniel, that doesn’t matter and she becomes part of his family. But to his mother, Alison is hiding something that isn’t good for her son. Fast forward to present day and Daniel is a music journalist in Edinburgh. He has a son and partner, and is getting by through writing about gigs, music history and everything in between. Alison now resides in Australia and is a bestselling author with two children and an esteemed husband. When she is forced to join Twitter by her publicist, a friend of Daniel’s alerts him to her presence. So he sends her a song. And Alison sends one back. It’s the new version of the mix tape he made her as a teenager and neither of them could understand the consequences…

Mix Tape is a great idea for a novel and it is well executed. The story of the protagonists’ shared past and each of their current day lives is interesting alone. Having the story told in alternate chapters from Daniel, then Alison’s point of view means the reader never has to want for more for each story. I enjoyed the music banter between Daniel and his friends and Alison’s turmoil with her family and friends as she starts to spread her wings. Having lines of song also captured in the narrative made for good sleuthing! I personally would have liked to see the mix tape listing at the back of the book to make it harder to peek (although I probably would have). A lot of great music is also mentioned (bonus points for including the best band in the cosmos, The Killers). I think the song from the Arctic Monkeys (also of Sheffield) is just right for this story. The mix tape also captures the emotions that are riding high during each part of the narrative. As for the narrative, I enjoyed the style and flow. The only part I found dragged a little was after Daniel and Alison meet and the ending. There are a lot of strong emotions going on here, and it would have been nice to summarise it a bit more to get back to the fun stuff. (Although I know from reading Netherwood that Sanderson is not afraid to be tough on her characters!)

Overall, Mix Tape is an easy, enjoyable read that I only paused reading to listen to the music!

Thank you to Penguin for the copy of this book. My review is honest.

http://samstillreading.wordpress.com ( )

I had been looking forward to reading Mix Tape by Jane Sanderson for a while before it finally came up in my schedule. I am of an age when mix tapes were common. I’d be listening to the radio on my boom box on a Sunday evening, a blank tape in the cassette deck, waiting for the Top 40 to start, with my fingers on the ‘play’ and ‘record’ buttons, poised to catch the opening bars of the whatever song I was hoping to record. We played mix tapes at parties, traded them among friends, and shyly gifted them to our boyfriend/girlfriend. I still have two or three of those tapes, though I no longer have anything to play them on.

Moving between the past and the present, this is the story of Daniel and Alison, who meet as teens in Sheffield, England in 1978. Their romantic relationship is brief, but intense, ending abruptly when Alison is compelled to flee her harrowing home life. Alison’s journey eventually leads her to Australia, and in 2012 she is a bestselling novelist, married with two near-adult daughters, when Dan, a music journalist whose home base is in Scotland with his wife and college bound son, receives a tweet from an old friend directing him to the profile of @AliConnorWriter. When Dan finally reaches out to the woman who has haunted his dreams for decades, he does so with a music video that speaks to a seminal moment in their relationship, ‘Pump It Up’ - Elvis Costello and the Attractions, 1978.

“No words, no message. Only the song, speaking for itself.”

Mix Tape is unapologetically a love story, a tale of soulmates forcibly parted, and then reunited after a separation of thirty years.

Sanderson wonderfully captures the intensity of Daniel and Alison’s connection as teenagers. Dan, sweet and steady, is infatuated with the beautiful and enigmatic Alison. Alison, whose home life is chaotic and neglectful, basks in Dan’s admiration and returns his desire. When she leaves they are both devastated, aware they have lost something special.

When Dan and Ali reconnect decades later, they initially communicate only by trading songs via Twitter that remind them of their relationship, and then songs whose lyrics speak to their growing desires. I’m in my mid forties so I wasn’t particularly familiar with a fair amount of the music referenced in Mix Tape, and I found myself having to stop and search through YouTube on occasion to listen to the song to understand its significance. It’s a delightful idea though, a modern take on those not so subtle cassette mix tapes declaring love

Without sharing a word, despite all the time that has passed, the physical distance between them, and being married to other people, Dan and Alison rekindle the flame. Here is where Sanderson lost me a little, because while the idea of a love that cannot be denied is romantic, that it comes at the expense of others, even if neither of their spouses are particularly likeable, is uncomfortable for me. Still the inevitable reunion is epic, and to the author’s credit I wanted it to happen.

Mix Tape is unapologetically a love story, but it’s also about heartache, nostalgia, loss, forgiveness, and the music. While my feelings about it remain a little mixed, it has its charms. ( )