Monday, February 17, 2014

Road Rash: By Mark Huntley Parsons

ROAD RASH

SUMMARY

After being dropped from one band, 17-year-old drummer Zach gets a chance to go on tour with a much better band. It feels like sweet redemption, but this is one rocky road trip. . . .

Zach's in control on the drums, driving the band, keeping things moving at the right pace. But when the show is over, his timing is all off. The jealousies and rivalries within his new group keep him off-balance. The awesome original song he recorded backfires. And the girl he left back home is suddenly talking about this other guy . . .
REVIEW

Road Rash is a fun engaging book that has a great voice that will reel you in and wont let go until the last page.

I loved Road Rash, not only did I commiserate with the protagonist, but like a a great song I could feel all the emotions Zach was going through. I could feel his frustration with bend flare-ups, his confusion with girl problems, and most importantly his love and joy of the music. In my opinion, that’s one of the key distinguishing factor between a good YA (heck this is true for any book, but particularly for YA) and mediocre or bad YA, whether or not the audience is able to feel the emotions that the author is going for. If you’ve bought into the book to the extent that you’re riding the waves of emotion that the protagonist is feeling, then the author has done a good job. Well let me tell you, Mark Huntley Parsons has done a great job.

Of course, on top of loving the characters and the writing, I also thought Parsons did a fantastic job balancing all the different storylines, thus creating a healthy medium for them to build off one another without any of them overriding Zach’s main journey (the only storyline that I wanted Parsons to come back to that he didn’t was the postcard storyline (I understand what he was getting at, but I still would have liked to come back to it)). This, coupled with Parsons excellent pacing of the book, kept me reading to the point that I started and finished the book in the same day.


All in all, I really liked Road Rash. I would easily recommend it to anyone looking for a good read, particularly if they liked Tara Kelly’s Amplified, Jacob Slichter’s So You Wanna Be a Rock and Roll Star, Antony John’s Five Flavors of Dumb, or Love Maia’s DJ Rising (all fantastic books!). In fact, all that’s left to say after finishing Road Rash is ENCORE!

INFO

Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers

Published: February 11, 2014

Price: $16.99

Link to Buy: http://www.amazon.com/Road-Rash-Mark-Huntley-Parsons-ebook/dp/B00EMXBD7U/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1392698501&sr=8-2&keywords=road+rash

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