3 out of 4 stars
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My Trip to Adele contains three parallel stories about people planning to go to an Adele concert. The stories are about Elias in Rome, a couple Yaser and Mariam in Las Vegas, Nevada, and Nadia and her child in Amman, Jordan.
Elias is a Moroccan man currently living in Rome. On a previous visit to Marrakesh, he met a woman named Malika. For unclear reasons, he didn't keep his promise to take her to Rome with him. His story starts eight years later in Marrakesh when a fortuneteller tells him a spell was cast on him to make him leave Malika.
In Las Vegas, Yaser and Mariam are trained professionals, both surgeons, whose marriage is on the rocks. They consult a marriage counselor whose advice is to seek happy memories and try to rekindle their romance.
In Jordan, Nadia is a single mother who has left an abusive relationship. She worries about a friend in a similar abusive relationship while trying to be the best mother to her son she can be. Her son has never been on a vacation, so she wants to take him to an Adele concert (his favorite singer) for his birthday. Her ex-husband complicates things.
The book is made up of twenty-five chapters each titled after a song on Adele's album 25. I was skeptical about the premise at first. Fanfiction readers will be familiar with the songfic genre. It's rarely done well. Usually the song lyrics are thrown in, in a way that doesn't make sense, and the story is forcibly made to fit the song lyrics in a really on the nose way. It works in this book. There's a few lines of song lyrics, and they always fit and make thematic sense with what is going on in the story. The Adele references are never forced.
None of these characters ever meet, but all parts of the book fit together well. We get a sense of how music can connect people, and bring back good memories.
I give this book 3 out of 4. I reserve a higher rating for books that blow me away, that I plan to re-read. This book was very enjoyable, and different from a lot of things I've read before, but I wasn't drawn in by the characters. There's not much of story arc since the different stories in the book are all about a little snapshot of people's lives as they plan on going to a concert. There were moments where I got bored with the book. It's not one that I couldn't put down.
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My Trip to Adele
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