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A Song for a New Day

3+/5. Twenty-ish years after a rash of violence and a pandemic, a young woman quits her job at not!Amazon to go work for a big holo music company. Her job is to travel the country in search of talent, which means infiltrating the secret and generally illegal live music scene. It's hard to have a scene when any gathering of more than 10 or 20 people violates social distancing laws.

A 2019 book that is getting a lot of play right now, for the obvious reasons. This is a good book about growing up in a quarantine culture and what it does to you. One of our protagonists is an anxious bean, shall we say. It's also about art and authenticity and music and selling out. The arguments this book presents between the recruiter and the underground musician she's after are interesting – they're about being co-opted by the system and acting from within, and the value of both. But honestly, these are arguments that were deeply relevant to my life say twelve years ago, back in law school. I've made my way through them for myself, I've found my peace, I've cashed some checks and done some good and won some and lost some, and this debate just isn't interesting to me anymore.

This is a sobering and deeply relevant world, though. And full of queer women, if I didn't mention that.

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