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My Favorite Band Does Not Exist Robert T Jeschonek Books

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My Favorite Band Does Not Exist Robert T Jeschonek Books

My Favorite Band Does Not Exist by Robert T. Jeschonek
Clarion Books, 2011
325 pages
YA; Fantasy
3/5 stars

Source: Received a free ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is definitely one of the most unique books I've ever read with a premise I'm not sure I can describe. The writing is mostly clear (especially with the confusion of plot) with likable characters and there were some interesting thoughts about failure, control, and authorial dictates. But because of the plot, I didn't feel entirely connected to the book as a whole.

I will try to explain without spoiling anything because this was wonderfully different with a general sense of happiness for me and worth a try if you can get this at the library. Idea Deity is on the run and suffering from Deity Syndrome, the suspicion that he is a character in a novel where the author while kill him (in this case, in chapter 64). His chapters alternate with Reacher Mirage, lead singer of the secret band Youforia. Their lives intersect when Idea realizes that his made-up band Youforia has taken on a life of its own and Reacher realizes that some one is leaking details about his band that would have been impossible to know. Somehow their lives are overlapping and intersecting; mixed up in this is the novel that both guys are reading called Fireskull's Revenant and a mysterious girl with a face on both sides of her head.

I hope that makes sense although it might not because I spent much of the book somewhat confused. Each story within itself made sense but as they started overlapping, my confusion grew. Suffice it to say that there is a very real reason for the similarities in their lives and that most is explained even if I didn't quite catch it all.

Overall: While I cannot in good conscience recommend that you run out and buy this book (because I didn't enjoy it enough to do that), I think it's a distinct change from the usual YA and might be good for fans of Alice in Wonderland, Douglas Adams, and Terry Pratchett.


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My Favorite Band Does Not Exist Robert T Jeschonek Books Reviews

Robert T. Jeschonek is a seasoned magazine writer, blogger, serial and short feature writer in as many media as you can count. This, however, is his first novel, and in my opinion, for whatever it's worth, it's a dandy first outing. I say "for whatever it's worth" because it's a first for me too; my first peek into the world of Young Adult Urban Fantasy, the genre shelf where this novel hangs its hat.

If you're new to this genre yourself, you're in for quite a ride. Its spirit is indeed hi-tech urbanized, gothy, punky, imbued with its appropriate quotient of teen angst and chronic misgiving, full of youthful high spirits and hijinx, but not frivolously so; the serious side of life is maintained and respected. Withal, it kind of takes me back, in a way. However, more important is its foray into the conventions of a genre that is still novel enough to be experimental; a world where much of even familiar reality is not quite, or at least reliably, familiar. In our mundane universe, even hippie kids don't often have names like Idea Deity or Eunice Truant, the lead characters here, or the equally strange monikers/avatars which apply to them in other parallel universes they simultaneously inhabit and must deal with, in the course of the convoluted plotting unfolding in these pages, to get where they're bound.

These other parallel universes, of which there would appear to be at least two, or maybe even three or four, in play, are the first clue that what Eunice and Idea are bound on is a quest, in the classic story-telling sense, however non-standard and non-classic the terms of their quest may be. A quest for love? At least partly. A quest for self-identity and self-worth, the meaning of life and such? Most definitely. Entertainingly, as well as edifyingly, so? Absolutely, as long as you don't harbor a deep personal need for reality to always hold still and always be what it seems. The alternate realities through which this plot wends its way are close neighbors, are indeed parallel and, most importantly, convergent, meaning that the climax of their story lurks in what happens when they finally all come together.

In practical terms, the Post-Modern conventions of what is happening here seem to resonate with the worlds of String Theory, Heisenberg Uncertainty, Timeline anomalies, etc., but no matter, because Jeschonek never bothers your head or disfigures his narrative with any of that. Sufficient to his purposes are the vagaries of the Internet, with its strange meme-powers to make virtual realities spring into life around us by cybernetic spontaneous generation. Idea's first problem is who and what he is, and for how long, a riddle occasioned by a cosmological glitch and more serious even than he realizes, and his fateful encounter with the uncannily wise and resourceful Eunice in his peril-fraught flight from it, a hookup by no means as accidental as he, at least, first imagines. His second big problem is the internet-viral explosion out of nowhere of the Next Big Thing, the rock band Youphoria and its mushrooming, increasingly problematical fan base, hooked on a universally downloaded single, "Corpuscle Porpoise." Problematical for Idea, at least, since Youphoria was never anything but an internet spoof website that Idea himself created, with no band members, music, lyrics, nada, that ever existed outside his own imagination. And yet now, here they are, all over the internet, having already played at least one legendary secret gig in Hotknee, Nebraska.

From there on it all gets even more complicated as we go on to meet the all too real band members themselves and other equally important players in their own alternate universes, including Lord Fireskull and Johnny Without in the world of "Fireskull's Revenant," an oddball fantasy novel, itself a spoof, that ends up being the indispensable survival manual for the fatal convergence of the parallel universes in play. There is no way to relate any of the strange twists in this narrative without having to explain so much along the way as to turn a review into a spoiler, so never mind; this is good writing by a yarn spinner who obviously knows his stuff.
Three stories run in parallel in this novel. In the first, a young man named Idea Deity tries to evade his parents' cult's bodyguards, with the help of a stranger named Eunice. Idea, who is drawn to irony the same it way it is drawn to him, amuses himself by inventing a fake rock band named Youforia and posting updates about it on the fake website he's devoted to the group. The second story is about Reacher Mirage, lead singer of the rock band Youforia, who is peeved that someone is spilling the band's songs and secrets to the public when the group hasn't even debuted yet (thanks to Reacher's overwhelming stage fright).

The third story (its interludes are recognizable from its mock-wrinkled and pseudo-burnt pages) is a fantasy novel called Fireskull's Revenant that both of the other two main characters are reading.

All three narratives flow easily and are highly readable. While I enjoyed this story, it was a little too deliberately clever and "meta" for my taste. The characters' names seemed an imitation of David Foster Wallace, and while the larger plot (running at the level of meta about meta) tied up nicely, it felt like an exercise in humor that wasn't actually funny.

This is the kind of book I normally would get a kick out of, and I'm not sure why that didn't happen. Maybe the genre shift from quirky fiction to fantasy was too slow to make the story's niche more obvious. My rating is three-and-a-half stars, for a well-written story that I'm sure others will find funnier and hipper than I did.
My Favorite Band Does Not Exist by Robert T. Jeschonek
Clarion Books, 2011
325 pages
YA; Fantasy
3/5 stars

Source Received a free ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This is definitely one of the most unique books I've ever read with a premise I'm not sure I can describe. The writing is mostly clear (especially with the confusion of plot) with likable characters and there were some interesting thoughts about failure, control, and authorial dictates. But because of the plot, I didn't feel entirely connected to the book as a whole.

I will try to explain without spoiling anything because this was wonderfully different with a general sense of happiness for me and worth a try if you can get this at the library. Idea Deity is on the run and suffering from Deity Syndrome, the suspicion that he is a character in a novel where the author while kill him (in this case, in chapter 64). His chapters alternate with Reacher Mirage, lead singer of the secret band Youforia. Their lives intersect when Idea realizes that his made-up band Youforia has taken on a life of its own and Reacher realizes that some one is leaking details about his band that would have been impossible to know. Somehow their lives are overlapping and intersecting; mixed up in this is the novel that both guys are reading called Fireskull's Revenant and a mysterious girl with a face on both sides of her head.

I hope that makes sense although it might not because I spent much of the book somewhat confused. Each story within itself made sense but as they started overlapping, my confusion grew. Suffice it to say that there is a very real reason for the similarities in their lives and that most is explained even if I didn't quite catch it all.

Overall While I cannot in good conscience recommend that you run out and buy this book (because I didn't enjoy it enough to do that), I think it's a distinct change from the usual YA and might be good for fans of Alice in Wonderland, Douglas Adams, and Terry Pratchett.