At best this is an excellent work of music appreciation masquerading as an aggressively uninteresting novel. The prose about specific works of music is engaging and transformative but the story feels so inconsequential it's hard to feel like anything much is at stake. A bunch of boys who seem to have nothing more serious to worry about than what their music is recorded on sit around and hope the owner of an errant handbag comes back for it. Then she does. It doesn't feel tedious exactly but I wonder if the tedious banality of the characters lives is being intentionally placed in counterpoint to the big ideas and tragic stories of the music. And the narrative payoff is an improbable tropey romance that I desperately hope no one takes seriously with regard to what to expect out of their relationships.