You’d Be Mine

A Star is Born gets a country-teen crossover in You’d Be Mine by Erin Hahn, a book I’d heard a lot about on Twitter. Then, it was a YA Book of the Month Pick and I ultimately traded for it. I love the cover, and I was drawn to it as a country music based book, because I don’t read a lot of those.

Bad boy Clay needs good girl Annie to come on tour with him to help restore his image, but Annie’s got reservations. Her parents are country music’s greatest tragic love story, and she doesn’t want to end up like her parents: dead. But music is in her blood and she loves to perform, so Annie agrees, and a summer on tour does something to the heart. Told in alternating chapters between Annie and Clay, they both have to overcome their loses to find each other and find their way forward.

This book was really cute. It reminded me a LOT of a Star is Born, but for country music teens, and that’s now mentioned in one of the reviews, so I feel less bad for thinking that, even if this gets a happier ending. There’s drugs and sex and Johnny Cash, but at the heart of this book is the struggle to overcome loss, especially when it affects you so personally and no one will let you forget it.  I liked the inclusion of song lyrics as well, which is where the title comes from. I didn’t always feel the power of the relationship between Clay and Annie, but I was still a little teary-eyed at the end, so it must have done something to me. Erin Hahn’s really prolific on Twitter in the writing world, and I’m sad I missed her at a local author talk, but I’m looking forward to whatever she does next.