Review: "Not Another Love Song" by Julie Soto

Not Another Love Song by Julie Soto
Published July 2024 via Forever
★★★

Xander's been told since the time he could hold a bow that he was destined for greatness—and he's delivered. Gwen is just happy to be making a living doing something she loves. And then they realize that together they make sweet, sweet music...

Okay, I'll be honest: I picked this up because I wanted to make music puns. Don't get me wrong, I'm as happy as the next person to read a romance between a violinist and a cellist—but mostly I wanted to make music puns. Bad ones. Consider this your warning.

Gwen is sweet, if often naïve: She's worked hard to earn her seventh-chair position, and while she's aware that it's unusual for someone to leap from seventh chair to first chair—and to suddenly be in a leadership position and a spotlight—at least four people (Xander, Mabel, and the two people who choose to hire her) have to spell out that she's being used before it clicks for her...several months later. Also, while she might be one of the orchestra's high notes, it's interesting that she's at her best when playing unprepared and often without the correct sheet music—a position that she finds herself in almost exclusively outside the confines of the pops orchestra so determined to promote (and use) her.

Xander I had a harder time with. He comes in with an ego, dancing to the beat of his own metronome, and it never fully clicks for him that being a prodigy, a virtuoso, is not enough to make one a good person. He complains that Nathan and Ava have been stringing him along, but it never occurs to him that he's consistently been the discordant note in their pops orchestra—that maybe if he put in the barest effort (or gave the pops orchestra the barest amount of respect), they'd be singing a different tune. Given that he's the hero of the romance, it worries me that I don't think there's a commitment in the book that he sees as unbreakable. Whether he's playing with his band or with the orchestra, he's perfectly happy to cast off his responsibilities with no notice as soon as something better comes along.

Where that leaves us, then, is with a romance that doesn't sit quite right with me. It's hot, sure; readers who like some spice will get a kick out of this. But Xander assumes things in his professional life and he assumes them in his personal life, and I'm not sure there's ever really a moment where he stops to think about whether Gwen is okay with him making choices for her—about her music (pushing her to think outside the Bach?), about the public or private status of their relationship, about their sax life. There's a lot of assumed consent throughout, and although Gwen is okay with Xander's poor conduct (and starts taking cues from him to cast off her own commitments), it's not a duet I'd buy a season ticket to.

There's an author's note at the beginning saying that this is Reylo fanfiction (I had to look this up; something to do with Star Wars), and I'd sort of forgotten about that until I got to the later parts of the book with Thorne & Roses (where there's A Major sense of fanfiction that can B flat if you've forgotten you're getting fanfiction...? I might need to workshop that one). I don't mind a solid nod to fanfiction (see Rainbow Rowell's Simon Snow series), but in this case I think I'd have preferred something that didn't have the wish-fulfillment aspects of fanfiction, because Gwen and Xander should have plenty to deal with on their own. I'm likely to be an outlier here, but I wouldn't have minded a coda in which we learn that Gwen has decided to more actively conduct her own life and strike out on her own as a solo act.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.