Reviewed by: BigAl
Genre: Memoir
Approximate word count: 30-35,000 words
Availability
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on a YES above to go to appropriate page in Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or
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Author:
An Indie
Musician who performs and records as The Glass Child, this is Charlotte
Eriksson’s first book.
Description:
“The story
of The Glass Child, Charlotte Eriksson, is one of those you usually see on
movies. Only 18 years old she left everything she had and knew in Gothenburg,
Sweden, and moved to London to dedicate her whole life to her music and art. A
vague dream about reaching out turned out to be an extraordinary fight for true
and real art. A journey about self-discovery, learning solitude, the difference
between having a home and feeling at home and how she finally found a home in
herself, in her music, in her words.”
Appraisal:
I’m torn as
to what my overall appraisal of Empty
Roads & Broken Bottles should be. Just as the story is full of highs
and lows, the quality of the telling is the same. Near the beginning Eriksson
explained her goal in chronicling her journey of self-discovery like this:
I'm here to kill your hero. I'm here
to tell you about the real climb, the real mountain; the stepping-stones that
break, the beasts that no one warned me about, the storm that killed my fire
and stole my friends.
I thought
that was a powerful description and a laudable goal. When she said she’d “like
to spend my life arriving in new cities every morning” and that she wished “for
company and someone to share this with,” but that another part craved “solitude
and places far, far away,” I got it. I understood and have had the same
conflicting emotions myself.
When she
described the feeling she got playing music on stage, how it was another kind of acting that allowed her to take on a persona much different than who she was
off stage, it reminded me of my musician friend who seems in total control while
performing on The Tonight Show or in
front of an audience of any size, yet is painfully shy when not in the
spotlight.
While I
thought the book started great, the deeper into it I got the more generic or
vague it seemed to get (whereas I would have expected and wanted the opposite).
It started seeming like random journal entries (at one point I’m fairly sure it
was) rather than a coherent whole. The same thoughts started getting repeated and
the the point of the entire exercise became more and more unclear to me. Would
it be cheating to recommend just reading the first 30% or so?
FYI:
Some adult
language.
Format/Typo Issues:
A small
number of proofing and copy editing misses.
Rating: *** Three
stars
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