Girl Defective continues to haunt...

Girl Defective is the kind of novel that continues to beat in your soul long after you've finished it. I absolutely loved the characters, the story, the love, but I also adored all the music references and jotted down almost every song referenced.

I re-discovered some favorites and found some "new" to me. Tim Hardin's "It'll Never Happen Again," for instance, is one track I pulled up online right away to listen to, then bought off iTunes because it's so achingly beautiful. As Sky says, "the mournful piano was like a finger prodding me."

Some people cite High Fidelity as their favorite music-infused novel. I mean it with all sincerity when I write that Girl Defective pretty much topples that to the ground. It's more heartfelt, more earnest and, in a fiction world where record collectors and music lovers are almost always guys, it's nice to have a girl be the main character.




"Music was everything: the whole stinging, ringing pulse of being human was in here."