Review: Wait For Me (by Amy Jo Burns)

My Rating: 4 stars

I loved both of the previous 2 novels that Amy Jo Burns had written (2020’s Shiner and 2024’s Mercury), so going into her newest work Wait for Me, I of course had high expectations.  In this regard, Burns definitely delivered, giving us another emotional, immersive story that revolves around two strong yet flawed female protagonists whose struggles with love, loss, loneliness, and heartbreak manifest in their music, which becomes the lifeblood of their existence.  Burns tells the story of these two women – Elle Harlow and Marijohn Shaw – in a unique and interesting way.  Though there are technically two different timelines in the story – Elle’s portion takes place mostly in 1973 while Marijohn’s takes place two decades later in 1991 – Burns does not employ the usual method of alternating between the two timelines in an obvious way; rather, she anchors majority of the story in 1991 and uses the event of a meteor strike to “break open” the past in the sense that it gives us multiple extended flashbacks to Elle’s backstory, but aside from that, the story for the most part is firmly rooted in 1991.  Also, in terms of physical structure, the title of each chapter is either the track number from an album or the name of individual songs that are mentioned throughout the story – not only that, but the content in each chapter actually ties back to the song title that starts the chapter.  I thought this structure was brilliant and it added a layer to the storytelling that I wasn’t quite expecting but worked wonderfully.

Overall, I really enjoyed this one, but didn’t love it as much as I did Burns’s previous two novels.  While the writing was in the same lyrical style and the characters were also brilliantly rendered (as I said in my review of Mercury, Burns has a way of writing her characters with a lot of heart and empathy to the point that you can’t help rooting for them, even when they do frustrating things), I found that this story didn’t resonate with me as much as those previous ones did.  Perhaps this is because I’m not much of a fan of country or folk music and so lack the familiarity with that world (which plays a huge role in the novel) that I think would have made this a much more resonant and poignant read for me otherwise.

This may not have been my favorite Amy Jo Burns novel, but it’s still an excellent read that I highly recommend.  I’m greatly looking forward to what Burns will come out with next!

Received ARC from Celadon Books via NetGalley.