This RITA® Reader Challenge 2015 review was written by Christine. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Long Contemporary category.

Here is Christine's review:

I grabbed this book when the sign-ups came out because I’ve enjoyed Ms. Cullinan’s writing in the past—her story Let it Snow is something I’ve reread a couple of times, even though I don’t generally reread things. It’s a sweet, pretty low-angst Christmas story with interesting characters, and I really enjoyed the Minnesota backwoods setting. Fever Pitch didn’t work quite as well for me, but I still found it eminently readable and gobbled it up.

First off, I have to say that I like the cover; it caught my attention in a positive way with its utter lack of shirtlessness and groping. The geeky guy playing air guitar led me to expect something upbeat and funny, though, and what Fever Pitch delivers is actually a lot of young adult drama and angst and not so much youthful whimsy. To be fair, the cover copy definitely alludes to the main characters having serious problems that they’re hoping to escape in college, but I still clung for a long time to the expectation of quirky joie de vivre.

Despite being somewhat caught off-guard by this disparity between cover and content, I had a hard time putting this book down. There’s so much at stake for the protagonists, and that transitional time between the end of high school and the end of the first year of college is really compelling to observe, whether in fiction or in real life. Also, I went to a small liberal arts college, so reading Fever Pitch was kind of like attending an alumni weekend, I guess. I enjoyed getting to know the campus alongside the protagonists, and I learned about the Minneapolis skyway system, which was cool.

That being said, this book is not for everybody—by which I mean that it feels like it was written with a very specific readership in mind: basically, music geeks in their late teens. Make that, privileged music geeks in their late teens who are attending lovely, small liberal arts colleges right now. There are so many pop culture references that I fear the book will have a very short shelf life (so to speak). I’m only vaguely aware of most of the music the characters reference (and only because I have a young teenager myself), and I imagine that in three years the huge love the characters feel for songs like “Titanium” will not resonate, even with college-aged readers.

The sheer amount of stuff happening in Fever Pitch also made it hard for me to get deeply involved in the story. There’s a lot of slice-of-life stuff where the story’s momentum kind of dies, there’s a ton of introspection, there’s lots of angst and drama, there are many pages devoted to secondary characters (who all eventually kind of ran together for me) and the reappearance of characters from the first book in the series….

 

And on top of all that there are many lengthy descriptions of music-making: jam sessions, lessons, rehearsals, auditions, composing, arranging, performances. Am I forgetting anything? Probably! I know that there are readers out there who are going to love this book so hard because of all the music stuff, but personally I found myself skimming those sections. (And I actually did spend a lot of time in practice rooms during college, so although I’m no musical genius, I can relate at least a little to the college musician experience.) In this respect, Fever Pitch felt sort of like fanfiction to me because there is so much self-indulgence in the choice to include All The Things and then add a musical score, too. I was happy to take the trip with the author, but I didn’t really feel like it was written with the average romance reader in mind, and I didn’t ever get terribly invested in the protagonists or their relationship.

I’m not sure how I feel about the portrayal of the young gay person’s experience here. Do that many straight high school guys have sex with gay guys out of desperation and/or self-loathing and then bully or assault them? I don’t know. I have a hard time believing that Giles had sex with such a substantial portion of the male student population at his high school, but maybe I’m naive. Also, Giles was put in the hospital twice by gay bashers during high school. His parents are written as being very loving and supportive–and they do basically swoop in and save all the gay kids at college towards the end of the book. But that leaves me wondering why those same parents seem to have basically just sat on their hands for years while their kid was getting bullied/ostracized/assaulted all through high school. The dad is a pediatrician; you can’t tell me the family didn’t have the means to take their kid out of school and send him to a private school, or homeschool him, or move to a whole different place if that’s what it took. I mean, if even a tiny fraction of what happened to Giles happened to one of my kids, I would intervene in a way more dramatic fashion than Giles’ parents apparently did. I had a much easier time believing in Aaron’s narcissistically negligent parents who at least behave consistently throughout the book.

Anyway, Fever Pitch kept me reading despite editorial and content choices that seemed questionable to me, and even though it made me feel sort of old and out of touch. The prose is engaging and the setting is very well developed, which seems like one of the author’s trademark strengths.