Why You'll Love This
She spent twenty years not looking for the woman who disappeared — and saving one crumbling music venue is about to make that impossible.
- Great if you want: queer love stories tangled in music history and old wounds
- The experience: slow-burn and bittersweet, moving between past and present
- The writing: Peers anchors emotion in specific details — Detroit, dive stages, 90s indie grit
- Skip if: you want fast pacing — this one lingers and looks backward
About This Book
Detroit, 1997: a woman on the edge of indie rock stardom, and the girlfriend who believed in her completely. Then, without warning, she's gone—and stays gone for twenty years. Motor City Love Song follows Jace as she reluctantly resurfaces to save a beloved Detroit music venue, which means tracking down Paloma, whose silence has always felt like an answer Jace wasn't ready to hear. This is a story about the particular grief of losing someone who is still alive somewhere, and about whether two people can face what they buried without destroying what they once were to each other.
Lisa Peers structures the novel across two timelines—the electric, dangerous late nineties and the more weathered present—using the contrast to let readers feel exactly how much time does and doesn't heal. The prose has the rhythm of the Detroit scene itself: sharp, a little bruised, occasionally gorgeous. What makes this book worth your time is its refusal to flatten its characters into the roles they played for each other. Jace and Paloma are complicated in ways that feel earned, and the mystery of what happened matters far less than the question of what happens next.
