Synopses & Reviews
From the author of The Perfect Play comes a charmingly
romantic-yet very edgy-novel set in the music industry about friendship,
love, growing up, and always following your dreams.
Danny McQueen has dreamed of being a pop star since he was thirteen-years-old. Now he's twenty-nine and still dreaming. But he faces a dilemma. His girlfriend Alison wants him to sort his life out. She's given him an ultimatum: Find a record deal by the end of the year or it's find a new girlfriend. When is it time to give up on your childhood ambitions? When is it time to stop watching Columbo in your underpants and get a proper job? Is six months long enough for one last assault on the big time? Is friendship ever more important than love? Is it just your imagination or can your girlfriend always tell when you've been looking at Internet porn? With the help of his boss Kostas, his two best friends, and an eighty-year-old Kung Fu enthusiast called Sheila, Danny McQueen is about to find out.
Review
"Nick Hornby fans take note: there's another brilliant British writer at work channeling lovable slackers....The gags are spot-on, the relationships touching. Wener scores another hit. Highly recommended for Gen-X audiences." Library Journal
Review
"This novel may strike some readers as the lite version of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity (1995) and Tom Perrotta's The Wishbones (1997); nevertheless, it is a sweet and funny read." Booklist
Review
"A lame, long-winded tale....[Danny is] such a flat character it's hard to care what happens to him. Much inferior to The Perfect Play, Wener's first and more mature novel to appear in the US before this fledgling effort..." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"The situation and resolution that Danny and his band go through are fraught with lucky coincidences, but it's all in the spirit of a tale with a happy ending....The language is very British, but fans of Nick Hornby and Helen Fielding should feel right at home." School Library Journal
Synopsis
From the author of
The Perfect Play comes a charmingly romantic yet very edgy novel set in the music industry about friendship, love, growing up, and always following your dreams.
Danny McQueen has dreamed of being a pop star since he was thirteen-years-old. Now he's twenty-nine and still dreaming. But he faces a dilemma. His girlfriend Alison wants him to sort his life out. She's given him an ultimatum: find a record deal by the end of the year or it's find a new girlfriend. When is it time to give up on your childhood ambitions? When is it time to stop watching Columbo in your underpants and get a proper job? Is six months long enough for one last assault on the big time? Is friendship ever more important than love? Is it just your imagination or can your girlfriend always tell when you've been looking at Internet porn? With the help of his boss Kostas, his two best friends, and an eighty-year-old Kung Fu enthusiast called Sheila, Danny McQueen is about to find out.
About the Author
Louise Wener was born and raised in Ilford, East London. In the mid-1990s, after singing into hairbrushes and working in dead-end jobs, she found fame as a lead singer with the pop band Sleeper and went on to record three top-ten albums and eight top-forty singles. She lives in London.