Mix Tape

by Jane Sanderson

Trigger warning (for the book, not the review): There is a teen pregnancy in the book and the father and sister are trying very hard to make the girl have an abortion when she doesn’t want to. I don’t know how this resolves, because see the DNF grade. But if you have triggers around emotionally abusive families or around other people deciding your healthcare, proceed with caution.

I picked up this book because it looked like the perfect nostalgia read – mix tapes and growing up in Adelaide in the 80s, and music, and a second chance romance felt like a great mood. Unfortunately for me, Mix Tape turned out to be a perfectly well-written book that was absolutely not to my taste. (Also, it turns out that the Adelaide part was from the meeting-again plot, so it was actually about growing up in Sheffield in the 1970s – still a fine sort of nostalgia, but less precisely aimed at my own past!)

The nostalgia part really is good. Sanderson has a gift for setting, and there is a strong sense of place and time, and the characters feel very real (with the exception of the Australian slang, which is a bit on the nose. A bit too much ‘bonzer’ and ‘mad as a frog in a sock’ for my sense of realism.)

The second chance romance is more of a problem, mostly because the two main characters are married to other people at the start of the book, and in Dan’s case at least, happily so (matters are more mixed for Ali). I found the rapidity with which they fell into flirtation-by-Twitter-message a bit distasteful, and was especially troubled by how quickly Dan justified this emotional infidelity to himself:

He wondered, was this juvenile? This avid interest in a woman he’d only ever known as a girl? But then: Fuck it, he thought, life is a weird and wonderful thing, and this isn’t any old girl, it’s Alison Connor.

So I guess that makes it alright then.

And then Dan’s friend, Duncan, starts having an affair, and when Dan’s wife (who is close friends with Duncan’s wife) gets angry about it, Dan immediately starts off with ‘Have you bothered to consider why he may have had his head turned?’ because, you know, apparently sometimes Duncan’s wife has an ‘occasional flint-eyed froideur’ and a ‘tendency to slip into boardroom steeliness’.

And that, my friends, is when I closed the book. Dan is a self-indulgent man-child and I have no interest in finding out whether he gets a happy ending or not. Ali is lovely and probably needs to leave her husband way behind her, but she can do far better than Dan. I suspect this story works just fine as women’s fiction or literary fiction. But as a romance, it’s two thumbs down from me.

– Catherine Heloise

You never forget the one that got away. But what if ‘what could have been’ is still to come?

Daniel was the first boy to make Alison a mix tape.

But that was years ago and Ali hasn’t thought about him in a very long time. Even if she had, she might not have called him ‘the one that got away’; she’d been the one to run away, after all.

Then Dan’s name pops up on her phone, with a link to a song from their shared past.

For two blissful minutes, Alison is no longer an adult in Adelaide with temperamental daughters; she is sixteen in Sheffield, dancing in her too-tight jeans. She cannot help but respond in kind.

And so begins a new mix tape.

Ali and Dan exchange songs – some new, some old – across oceans and time zones, across a lifetime of different experiences, until one of them breaks the rules and sends a message that will change everything…

Because what if ‘what could have been’ is still to come?