I’ve been reading Ashley Poston’s books for a while now, but Sounds Like Love could be my favorite! I’ve been in such a music mood that this hits the spot! It’s a story about finding and leaving our home. Keep reading this book review of Sounds Like Love for my full thoughts.
Summary
Joni Lark is living the dream. She’s one of the most coveted songwriters in LA…and she can’t seem to write. There’s an emptiness inside her, and nothing seems to fill it.
When she returns to her hometown of Vienna Shores, North Carolina, she hopes that the sand, the surf, and the concerts at The Revelry, her family’s music venue, will spark her inspiration. But when she gets there, nothing is how she left it. Her best friend is avoiding her, her mother’s memories are fading fast, and The Revelry is closing.
How can she think about writing her next song when everything is changing without her?
Until she hears it. A melody in her head, lyric-less and half-formed, and an alluring and addictive voice to go with it—belonging, apparently, to a wry musician with hangups of his own.
Surely, he’s a figment of her overworked imagination.
But then the very real man attached to the voice shows up in Vienna Shores. He’s aggravating and gruff on the outside—nothing like the sweet, funny voice in Joni’s head—and he has a plan:
They’ll finish the song haunting them both, break their connection, and hope they don’t risk their hearts in the process.
Because that song stuck in their heads? Maybe it’s there for a reason.
Review
(Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher. This has not impacted my review which is unbiased and honest.)
Sounds Like Love instantly delivers a heart of music. At its core, it’s a story about finding our love, our passion again. We can get so caught up in running, in working, that we forget why we are drawn to music. We forget what we love. Sounds Like Love is also about people who stay and people who leave. We can think we are running from something, only to realize that – in some ways – we never left. That a piece of us was behind this whole time. I loved these two themes within Sounds Like Love as Joni struggles not only with the direction in her life, but also her family.
As someone who’s been dealing with family member’s health, Sounds Like Love hit close to home. Joni navigates the guilt she feels not being home while also balancing her own dreams. She’s pulled in the direction of her career, her home, her passions. Which way should she go? Sounds Like Love is very much a romance story. It’s swoony and reminds us that we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. That to create something beautiful requires us to be vulnerable. When we put authenticity in, we create something that resonates with people. But it’s also a story about character development for Joni. She’s facing these immense intense changes in her life and trying to hold on tighter, but not all change is bad.
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And sometimes it’s more about the people we face the change with. In Sounds Like Love I really loved the relationship Joni had with her mother as they both figure out this new relationship where roles become a bit switched. Each of the characters, in some ways, are exploring what it means to confront our past dreams of our future and what that means for our future now. Find Sounds Like Love on Goodreads, Storygraph, Amazon, Bookshop. org, Blackwells, & Libro. fm.