Guest Review: THE ROCK STAR'S HOMECOMING by Linda Gould

The Rock Star's Homecoming
By Linda Gould
ISBN-10: 0595462839
ISBN-13: 978-0595462834
Paperback, 260 pages
December 11, 2007
iUniverse
Reviewed by Susan Helene Gottfried


From the back cover copy, The Rock Star's Homecoming, written by Linda Gould, sounds like an intriguing book. Two years ago, a band named Sunburst was expelled from a small college. Now, the students have rallied to bring them home to perform at the Homecoming dance and ignite the student body once again.

However, the back cover copy is misleading. This isn't really a story of how Sunburst affects the campus again. It's a story of a group of college kids in the 1970s and their biases and attempts to manipulate each other to get what they want, be it a prestigious husband or to watch their roommate go down. The action begins well before Homecoming and finishes well after, to the point that the Homecoming events become nothing stronger than another link in an odd chain of events. They aren't the be-all, end-all that's promised.

If the actual story itself were stronger, this wouldn't be so problematic. Yet other than saying The Rock Star's Homecoming is a story about a group of college students, I really can't pinpoint a plot. Some want revenge, some want fame, some want to take the others down… although Imogene is mainly the point of view character, this isn't truly her story, a fact that adds to the confusion.

One of the major problems is that there are simply too many characters. Even the author recognizes this, finally lumping a group of them together under the term "nondescripts" as though they aren't worth being recognized in any way as individual people. It's a judgmental term, only one of many in this novel. The football players are highly desirable as husbands yet at the same time are conceited jerks, every last one of them. The beautiful women are sneered at, and they in turn sneer at the less-comely. The religious students become faceless fanatics. One group does nothing but sit around and eat popcorn and drink Coke -- and pad themselves with fat, as though weight gain is the worst thing that could happen to a girl in college, even though we're told time and again that no, the worst thing is leaving without a fiance and your future thus secure.

Even the much-lauded rock band is portrayed as nothing more than an unpleasant bunch, spoiled by a success we hear about but never really see, and surrounded by incompetents. Jake's wife comes off as a Yoko Ono, rendering her unable to be a character on her own right, which is sad. She could support an entire novel, herself. When the band finally leaves the pages, it is a relief. Spending time with them, the title characters, is painful.

Maybe the problem is that I didn't get this book the way I was expecting to. I can't relate to women whose primary motivation is to line up a husband. I can't relate to a group of people who allow themselves to be shuttled off across four states to engage in a very public break-up. The band has no control over their roadies, security, management, or anything else. To be personally out of control is one thing. To see this degree of disaster is painful and it makes me doubt the claims of success this band has achieved. Surely someone was at the helm of the rise to stardom, someone more than the singer's kid sister. A kid sister who just happens to be a star athlete, and who no one condemns when it's revealed she had an affair with a married man.

Add in inexplicable diary-like sections at the start of each chapter, often told by characters we see only briefly and who haven't totally earned their spot in the book, and at times, I felt more like a voyeur into someone's personal grudge than a reader of a novel.

Despite some tendencies to dump information, Ms. Gould is a fine writer. A more finely-tuned plot with fewer characters and less of an axe to grind would take her far.