Main Character: Piper
Love Interest: Ed Chen (highlight to find out)
Series: None
Author: Website|Facebook|Twitter

The Challenge: Piper has one month to get the rock band Dumb a paying gig.

The Deal: If she does it, Piper will become the band’s manager and get her share of the profits.

The Catch: How can Piper possibly manage one egomaniacal pretty boy, one talentless piece of eye candy, one crush, one silent rocker, and one angry girl? And how can she do it when she’s deaf?

Piper can’t hear Dumb’s music, but with growing self-confidence, a budding romance, and a new understanding of the decision her family made to buy a cochlear implant for her deaf baby sister, she discovers her own inner rock star and what it truly means to be a flavor of Dumb.

I’m participating in another ARC Tour, hosted by the awesome Holly over Good Golly Miss Holly. I’ve received some pretty awesome stories from ARC Tours and I can’t say enough how awesome the ARC Tours is. Holly did a phenomenal job keeping track of everything and I appreciate her efforts in keeping things moving along.

You rock Holly!

Anyway, on with the review. This book follows Piper as she takes up the manager position of an up and coming rock band, Dumb. Yep, that’s their name. It’s pretty crazy how Piper gets roped into being the manager because she’s the manager of a music band and she’s….deaf.

How does this work, you ask? It just does. And while this book really does focus on the band and their emergence onto the Seattle music scene, the book was more than just a book about a manager and her band. It was about a deaf teenager struggling to find her place in the world. Piper is struggling with being deaf at school, at play and most definitely at home. The relationship she has with her family at the beginning of this book is totally dysfunctional and you can’t help but feel for her struggles with trying to talk to her parents and to communicate with her brother. Piper wasn’t born deaf, she started losing her hearing when she turned six years old and it got worse and worse as time went on until she was completely deaf. She now sports a hot pink hearing aid (the same one that she got as a kid) and she can read lips like a pro but she’s very self conscious about not being able to hear.

I really enjoyed this book and I can’t say enough good things about it. John did a phenomenal job of sucking me into the story right from the very beginning. As we watched Piper take on the responsibility of getting Dumb a paying gig and then seeing her battle it out with her parents over her baby sister’s cochlear implants that were paid with her college fund, you couldn’t help but sympathize with her. But as much as I sympathized with her, I never once pitied her. Piper was strong and she was smart and she totally grew into her own over the course of this book and I enjoyed every minute of it all.

I enjoyed getting to know the band right along with her and I enjoyed watching things build and build and build until she finally got it right because boy did she get it wrong quite a few times but when things finally work themselves out, you can’t help but be glad for Piper, for the band and for everyone really….except the dick of a lead singer.

I adored the friendship that blossomed between Piper, Tash and Kallie. All three girls were so different and yet they became such good friends that by the time the end came around, I loved the heck out of each of them.

The romantic element in this story was another great addition to the story. I loved Piper and love interest, I loved getting to know Piper’s family and really, I just adored the whole book. On Twitter, after I finished the book, I said that the book was cute but that was wrong. Cute is too light a word to describe this book. It was so much more than just cute.

John captured my interest with a deaf manager of a music band but he kept me interested with a delightful cast of characters and a story that fell right off of the pages. I enjoyed reading this book and I can’t recommend it enough. If you’re looking for a good contemporary story about a band then this is the book for you!

..and that’s your scoop!