
Some Strange Music Draws Me In
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Petey Gibson
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By:
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Griffin Hansbury
About this listen
From an award-winning author, this provocative novel tells an emotionally gripping story about friendship, family, and transgender awakening in a working-class American town.
It’s the summer of 1984 in Swaffham, Massachusetts, when Mel (short for Melanie) meets Sylvia, a tough-as-nails trans woman whose shameless swagger inspires Mel’s dawning self-awareness. But Sylvia’s presence sparks fury among her neighbors and throws Mel into conflict with her mother and best friend. Decades later, in 2019, Max (formerly Mel) is on probation from his teaching job for, ironically, defying speech codes around trans identity. Back in Swaffham, he must navigate life as part of a fractured family and face his own role in the disasters of the past.
Populated by a cast of unforgettable characters, Some Strange Music Draws Me In is a propulsive work about multiple electrifying relationships—between a working-class mother and her queer child, between a trans man and his right-wing sister, and between a teenager and her troubled best friend. Griffin Hansbury, in elegant, arresting, and fearless prose, dares to explore taboos around gender and class as he offers a deeply moving portrait of friendship, family, and a girlhood lived sideways. A timely and captivating narrative of self-realization amid the everyday violence of small-town intolerance, Some Strange Music Draws Me In builds to an explosive conclusion, illuminating the unexpected ways that difference can provide a ticket to liberation.
©2024 Griffin Hansbury (P)2024 Audible, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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gorgeous, satisfying, heartfelt trans lineage
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And DAMN the actor reading this book absolutely killed it. I could not stop listening, totally obsessed. Endlessly delighted by the full on mass accents throughout the entire book. 10/10. Hope he keeps on doing audiobooks, he gave this one such life!!!
Fantastic story STELLAR performance
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Just love. Fantastic story with a unique perspective tied to gender, class, and sexuality
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Reads like a memoir
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This book was like therapy to me
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The toggling between pre- pandemic contemporary adult life and the author’s teen self- alternating 1984 to 2019 -was such a great strategy for connecting to the narrator’s young self and how they have become who they are now. As a fellow gen X queer person from the burbs growing up in a single mom household with an assortment of family dysfunctions and class stress, I found almost everything down to the smallest details so much like a mirror of my own experience.
It is such a beautiful and funny story and so well written. Also super funny to have the Massachusetts accents! It really adds to the story, giving it place and authenticity.
Couldn’t Stop Listening
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