"[A] highly original and idiosyncratic memoir … In beautiful prose Greenlaw explains how her disparate musical experiences shaped her personality, helping her to form relationships and to assert her place in the world … [it] will resonate with everyone who has ever danced around a handbag or played air guitar."

Val Hennessy, Daily Mail Critic's Choice

 

"Lavinia Greenlaw's clever riposte to the High Fidelity band of writers is a memoir that takes us back through her teenage years in the Seventies … an award-winning poet and radio dramatist, Greenlaw has a gift for creating maximum impact in just a few words. There were several moments while reading The Importance of Music to Girls when I felt as if I had been hit in the stomach … There's a visceral intensity to this evocation of a misspent girlhood, as if all that angst and rebellion had been distilled into essence of punk. It should probably be required reading for all teenage girls."

Kate Chisholm, The Spectator

 

"It's the peculiar energy in Greenlaw's language which draws us in, like being plunged into a dance. The early chapters fizz with the excitement of the child's fearless exploration of the world; the sheer physicality of childhood is conveyed in language which feels kinaesthetic … The writing vibrates with memorable images."

Mslexia

"The Importance of Music to Girls" brilliantly traces the shaping of a rich, complex self. The soundtrack's not so bad either.
Peter Terzian, LA Times

 

In music, Greenlaw finds revelation and refuge, while revealing a poetic prowess in her keen and succinct observations: “This is what music could do: change the shape of the world and my shape within it, how I saw, what I liked, and what I wanted to look like… Does it depend upon whom you come across or is there something building up inside you, as I believe there was in me -- a half-formed vision needing an external phenomenon, such as music, in order to complete itself?”
The Importance of Music to Girls is poetic, clever, surprising, and incredibly endearing. Readers will root for Greenlaw’s teenage self, recalling their own missteps with fashion, friends, love, and of course, music. Greenlaw’s apt depiction of the thrill of musical discovery will bring back your own feelings of excitement (and naiveté) in believing you were the first person to ever listen to the Beatles or David Bowie. And even if you rocked out to New Kids on the Block or Hanson instead of Donny Osmond, Greenlaw’s story will have you regressing to the glee you felt hanging your own personal heartthrob’s poster on your wall, or cringing at that summer when you were the only one who thought your electric blue hair looked cool.
Marisa Atkinson, Bookslut

 

I’ve never read anything like it … In shorthand: It’s “High Fidelity” for chicks. It has all the coming-ofage angst and humor of Hornby’s classic, and, too, all the sense of pop music knowledge as secret handshake. In its grasp of music’s greater meaning — the way it can seem the only thing that really matters — it also echoes Mark Lindquist’s Seattle-based novel, “Never Mind Nirvana.” The difference is that it’s written from a female perspective. And that’s part of what makes this memoir so fresh. It grabs hold. Reading it is like hearing Roger Daltrey’s famous “Won’t Get Fooled Again” scream on eight Bose speakers at full blast: Are you awake now?
Margaret Sullivan, Buffalo News

 

 

Greenlaw has already established herself has a significant force in British poetry. This novel seems certain to confirm her developing reputation as a writer of lively, intelligent and well-crafted fiction.
The Guardian

 

A piece of ice in the eye, chilling and disturbing, a beautiful portrait of ordinary unhappiness at its best.
Irish Times

 

There is a deep sense of imminent reckoning pervading this subtle and intriguing novel; an unspoken understanding that the irresponsibility – personal and political – must come to an end.
Observer

 

It is hard not to compare this novel with The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen’s novel about family life at the end of the twentieth century … sensuous and richly descriptive.
Literary Review

“ ... the bleakness in her memories and seascapes comes across less as an eccentric extreme than as the way the world really moves, or rather the way it does not move, blue and static in its shining ice.”
Stephen Burt, TLS

“ ... the sensuous of her thought and her ability to move between the abstract and the precisely observed remain as potent as ever.”
William Wotton, The Guardian

… the perfect setting for Greenlaw to display her natural talent for creating a sense of simmering insurrection and then holding it on a razor's edge ... This is a terrific first novel, a meteorological force in its own right.

Marina Benjamin, The Evening Standard

 

A poet's eye clearly informs Greenlaw's beautifully observed portrait of Seventies provincial life. In prose layered like paint, Greenlaw conjures up the period through details - petrol shortages, power cuts, particular sweets and music, the regulation mini-bottles of warm school milk - that will strike endless chords with readers who grew up at that time. Greenlaw's nostalgia is palpable, but it is never sentimental, nor is her portrait of the eccentric but loveable Mary George - a genuinely original heroine. This is a suggestive, elusive novel, which achieves a magical effect by the gradual accumulation of images. But this outstanding debut does not lack immediacy or drama: its climax is a brutal murder.

Katie Owen, Vogue

‘Greenlaw’s control is formidable; in this volume there is scarcely a line or stress out of place.’

Elizabeth Lowry, TLS

 

‘Anxiety, love, desire and guilt pulse through her language … I hope ours is a world in which news of this book travels fast.’
Maggie O’Farrell, Independent on Sunday

 

‘This is a beautiful, intelligent, often sexy book that never shows off; it appreciates with each
re-reading.’

Robert Potts, The Guardian

‘Her work is immediately striking for its interest in science, and more lingeringly memorable for the way it combines an excited way of thinking with a calm way of looking.’

Andrew Motion, The Observer

 

‘… everything Greenlaw touches glitters and resonates, her discipline and skill allowing her to be serious, soulful, knockabout, funny and downright strange in the course of a few lines.’

Glyn Maxwell, Vogue

‘Her talent is undeniable and suggests that there is much to look forward to.’
Robert Potts, TLS