Books: I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone

I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone by Stephanie Kuehnert

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
Very readable and entertaining book. The story is about a young girl whose mother left her at four months old to follow the music of the punk scene. The girl starts her own band, in an effort to bring her mother home. In many ways, the simplicity of this story is appealing. But a few parts of the story lost me, and I will freely admit this has to do with a few of my own personal biases: my dislike of certain cultural institutions like MTV and Rolling Stone Magazine. I loved the part about how the band starts, with all of the natural conflicts and issues that are always there when creative types get together. I was less interested when the band gets unnaturally big, as it seemed…maybe a little unbelievable (but then again, that’s just my own bias.) I was kind of hanging on through the whole “mother left to follow the music” thing, because at my ripe old age it seemed like a dumb reason for a mother to leave. (I think I might not have been the right audience for this book.) But once her real reason for leaving is revealed, it was good to see that it was something much more complicated than that. Throughout the book, the author uses a liberal amount of adverbs which for me was a little distracting, making me very aware that someone is telling a story, preventing me from getting lost in it. I feel like this story is really good and could have benefited from a few less words here and there.

Overall, I respect what the author has done. The story is layered and interesting, with good characters--I like the first person narrative of the daughter-- and all in all it was almost like a history lesson of the punk movement as seen through the eyes of the characters. And the author’s background in “bad poetry” and “DIY feminist ‘zines” are pursuits close to my heart, which is the main reason why I examined this book a little more closely than some others.




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