Band Geek Love by Josie Bloss

Band Geek Love 

by Josie Bloss

The Gist (thanks, Amazon!):

All band, all the time. That's how trumpet goddess Ellie Snow has made it to senior year. No drama, no dating. Just keeping lock-step within the safe precision of the Winslow Marching Band. She's a fierce section leader now, and so over the heart-crushing social disaster of her freshman year. No boy is going to ruin Ellie's shining moment-her senior solo performance at the homecoming game.
And then Connor Higgins shows up. Not even Ellie can resist the trumpet player who could be a model for Abercrombie & Fitch. It's a hook-up made in band-geek heaven! But Ellie's not ready to publicize their romance, not even to her best friends. After all, Connor's just a sophomore. What would everyone say? Breaking formation and revealing her true self would be like . . . marching on the field completely naked!
Then Ellie discovers the flipside of secrets and how it feels to be shut out by the ones she loves.

My rating:

Four Stars

After seeing this book on Read Into This!, I knew I had to read it. Being a former "band geek" (1 year of clarinet, 3 years of color guard, thank you very much :) ), I knew I could at least relate with Ellie on the band aspect of things. As a whole, I appreciated that the characters were in band because they loved it, not because they had nowhere else to go.

The main character Ellie was... interesting. I could relate to her wants of her privacy and not wanting to be the gossip of the day. However, this made her shut out her friends a bit too much. She also dramatized on the fact that Connor was a sophomore a little too much. I could understand that it was a big deal for her, but there were time that it seemed like she took it too far, since the only one truly concerned about it was her. 

That being said, a lot of things were overdramatized in the novel. Secrets that weren't so big, conversations that weren't so dramatic, and so forth. Ellie's a very dynamic character. She has a lot of drive that she focuses a lot of different directions.

Overall, however, I really appreciated the novel in all its band geekinesss, haha.  The characters were fun, despite their dramas, and also really unique. Plus, how often do you read a novel about band geeks?

Band Geek Love and Band Geeked Out, its sequel, are both out now!