Octavian and Mina live and love in St Louis to the soundtrack of our lives in this warm novel which will get your toes tapping. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.

I couldn't get into this book, unfortunately. I am very thankful for the opportunity to review it but it wasn't my cup of tea.

I loved the style of writing, cast of characters, music references and overall story inside the pages. As a non POC, I appreciated a different POV regarding specific events that I would not have otherwise heard. That is so important to me! It's the first book I have read by this author and am glad I had the chance! Thank you Netgalley for this eARC,

There You Are is a novel that has been on my to read list for a while, and I'm so pleased that I picked it up this summer.

There You Are is a powerful novel, with extremely memorable characters and important reflections on race relations in America. Octavian Munroe and Mina Rose fall in love as teenagers in St. Louis, a city running deep with racial tension and segregation. Now years later, they cannot shake the impact that the relationship and their teenage years have had on their lives. News that the record store that provided a safe haven them and for many kids in the community is closing leads them back to St. Louis and draws the reader down a nostalgic path.

Music is one of the main driving forces behind this story - it seeps through every page of the novel and different decades of music structure the chapters. There are such beautiful layers of emotion woven throughout this novel - it is full of heart, but also sadness, anger and regret. I found its commentary on race relations extremely poignant and will definitely be recommending this book to others.

Great book! I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.
Thanks to the Publisher for giving me the opportunity to read it in advance

There You Are is a powerful story of love and loss and how fear shapes our relationships between friends, neighbors, and strangers. I loved the way the author told the characters' stories. The writing style arouses strong emotions in the reader. The way the characters are intertwined makes for an incredibly powerful story. It's a superbly written book. I highly recommend it. I would like to thank Netgalley, the publisher and the author for providing me with an advance reader copy in exchange for my honest and unbiased opinion of this book.

I’m still processing this book after finishing it a week ago. It’s a very powerful coming of age story, dealing with loss, family, drug addiction, and racial issues.

Set mostly in St. Louis, the book follows Octavian Munroe as learns what it is to be a man, and particularly an African-American man in the 1990s. Then later, as an adult, we see the issues he still deals with, and the scars he still carries with him.

This book really moved me, and sucked me in from the first few pages. The characters are rich, flawed, and deeply real. Their relationships are at once heartbreaking and heartwarming, and I found myself desperately yearning for them to find a happy ending.

I read part of the book in physical form and the rest as an audiobook. I loved the narration by Brandon Johnson.

This was a pleasure to read. It had me reminiscing for the 1980's, records and the stores you actually went into to buy them and best of all, St. Louis. I had the pleasure of living there for several years and adore this wonderful Midwestern town. This is a very readable novel that has a well-paced story that pulls the reader right into it.
I highly recommend this and loved the nostalgic feels.
Thank you for the early copy!
#ThereYouAre #NetGalley #AmberjackPublishing

Rating: 5 musically fueled stars

Kudos to author Mathea Morais! She has written a thoughtful and creative book about race relations in America, and so much else. She artfully shows what it means to be a Person of Color (POC) in America over the last few decades. She has done it in a creative way with prominently featured musical references that provide the downbeat and the high notes for the story. We meet Octavian Munroe and is family in St Louis, Missouri as his mother is dying from breast cancer. Octavian is only in the 5th grade. Her decline and death have a profound effect on him, his older brother Francis and their father, Cyrus who is professor of philosophy at a St Louis university.

Octavian and Mina meet during the 5th grade. They both take refuge in a concrete tube on the playground during school recess. There they can escape the other kids. Both Octavian and Mina are misfits at school. Mina helps Octavian through many anxiety attacks that occur in the tunnel. Mina’s mother then unexpectedly moves them away to a nearby white neighborhood. Octavian and Mina lose touch at that point since they don’t go to school together any more.

About seven years later, Mina (who is a white girl) meets Octavian again at the local record store that they both love. The record store and its cast of employees is a refuge from the chaos they are both experiencing. They fall in love during their senior year in high school. They struggle with what it means to be black or white, in the various neighborhoods that they frequent in St. Louis. They also struggle with the consequences and judgements of being an interracial couple.

I’m not going to spoil all the ins-and-outs of the plot line. Just believe me when I say that this book is written with a lot of heart. It works on so many levels; as a racial commentary, a coming-of-age story, a romance, a story about family interactions and the effects of drug abuse, and through it all the heart of the music beats strongly. Do yourself a favor and pick up this book. Read it. Share it with your friends. This book deserves to be showered with accolades. It is a gem. It this book was a song, it would be Grammy worthy.

‘Thank-You’ to NetGalley; the publisher, Amberjack Publishing; and the author, Mathea Morais for providing a free e-ARC copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

An interracial relationship. Music, and the journey to find yourself in the world, and within yourself. What a beautiful story of love, life, and struggles.


Synopsis: Octavian Munroe is haunted by the life and death of his older brother and Mina Rose has never quite fit in. Once lovers, now estranged, they both left their hometown of St. Louis for fresh starts in the wake of grief and heartbreak.

Octavian and Mina travel homeward in the aftermath of tragedy in search of answers. They seek out the music that once gave their hearts a steady beat and their lives a sense of direction. But the record shop where they fell in love as teenagers is closing for good, sparking a desire for closure as well as answers.

The powerful debut novel with Octavian, the black son of a university professor and poet, and Mina, the white daughter of a hippie feminist divorce attorney at the centre of the story, as they fall in love in 1980's St Louis.

But make no mistake - this is no romance novel. It discusses serious matters like race, addiction, class and growing up in a place that values segregation.

Music plays a big part in the telling of the story with it being divided into 3 decades, each with its own playlist. This way of telling it, makes it unique and highly enjoyable.

I loved this book and tore right through it. I love how the story used the record store as its touchstone for the book and the chapters were based around a mixed tape.
This is a powerful story of now and the past, of the characters as they are and as they look back on those formative teenaged years from where they are now. The book explores the characters figuring out what they want, what they like, what it means to be African American in a racially segregated neighbourhood.
There is the love story between Octavian and Mina Rose, there are friendships built around music and experience. The characters are wonderful, flawed, and are trying to find their place in the world and I was totally engaged with them. On its surface, the book is a coming of age story, but the looking back from their adult years makes the book so much more than that. There are wonderful friendships and bonding at the record store where the owner seems to know just what everyone needs.
The author does a fantastic job of captivating the reader and I highly recommend this book.
Thank you to Netgalley and Amberjack publishing for the review copy.

A fascinating and engrossing book with so much food for thought!
I loved everything, from the style of writing to the well written cast of characters, from the music references to the well crafted plot.
It's the first book I read by this author and won't surely be the last.
Highly recommended!
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

Funnily enough, I was just finishing up an essay on record store memories when I started reading this novel! It was as if I opened it at the perfect time, my own record store nostalgia meeting the fictional but oh so real record store nostalgia that is present all through There You Are. This book gave me all the feels, in so many ways.

There You Are is set in St Louis (mainly), and hops between 2014 (with the backdrop of Michael Brown’s murder by a police officer and the unrest that followed in Ferguson), and the mid 1980’s and 1990’s (for the most part). The narrative follows Octavian as he grows up in St Louis, losing his mother at an early age, and then watching his brother fall into the hell that is drug addiction and alcoholism. It also follows Mina, Octavian’s friend then girlfriend, and we see how their lives come together and diverge over the years. And in the middle of it all is Rashaan’s Record Store, and all of the other wonderful characters who Octavian and Mina surround themselves with.

Music brings people together. It always has, always will. I met my closest friends thanks to music, fell in love thanks to music, have amazing, amazing memories thanks to music. Despite hardships, pain, and racial divides, music brings the characters in this book back together, time and time again, and while it doesn’t provide real solutions (in the novel or in real life), it does provide an ground for us to grow on, together.

I loved the playlists for each decade - a great way to make the reader even more nostalgic than they already are reading this novel!

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance copy of this book – I highly recommend it, especially to those who have a song for every event and memory.

"There's no way for me to separate myself from my brother and no way to separate Francis from, I don't know being Francis. Do you understand?"
"I think so," Mina Said.
"I know it sounds crazy, but before I can even know what I, Octavian, want, I have to be sure that Francis is going to be alright first.:
"I understand," she said.
"How?"
Mina took a deep breath. "Because that's how I feel about you sometimes."

I loved every bit of this book. There's so much that's special about it. It's about Octavian and Mina who meet when they are 5 and become friends but then they go to separate schools and lose touch and then come together again as teenagers, both working in a record store.

The novel follows their lives, going back and forth in time and jumping around to also show Octavian's father's perspective and the record store owner's (Bones) who might have been one of my very favorite characters. In fact, the handful of chapters that are his backstory might be my favorite where I was so delighted, I laughed out loud.

The characters in this story are so well developed, so three dimensional, so layered and textured and real that it's not possible to not get invested in all of them. The music store as a setting is absolutely perfect and such a great place for all these young people to come together and form relationships of a lifetime.

There is a lot about racism in this book but no new revelations or lesson, more about the role it plays in the characters' lives in all sorts of ways that feel real and remind the reader about how far we have not come without being preachy at all. There's a profound-to-me section where Octavian's dad is still trying to be respectful and let his neighbor's feelings matter more than his about a racially charged event and it just made me realize how much I still have to learn and how far we all still have to go. The story made me think and wince and highlighted how there's still so much to do. It's so beautifully woven into the story, feels so authentic to the characters.

"...but as he wrapped her in his arms, he felt a gathering of pieces of himself that had scattered since the time when he hadn't known pain so intimately. He pressed them together into his own box of memories and closed the lid."

This book is not just about race, it's about family, love, friendship, being young, belonging, and so much more. Race is a layer across all of it since it's a big part of the character's experiences as they move through life. The loyalty and responsibility Octavian feels to his brother. The love he and Mina have for each other and how love of that magnitude is often complicated.

"She wasn't sure she had the energy to manage the life she had created."

I will repeat that I loved every bit of this book. The characters, the setting, the writing, it was all beautifully done. Highly recommended.

With gratitude to netgalley and Amberjack Publishing for an early copy in exchange for an honest review.

I absolutely loved this book! I’m not a fan of hiphop, but I can certainly appreciate music and its universal power to bring so many different people together. Interweave that with pertinent social issues, and I’m sold.

This book is full of time jumps across chapters, opening in the aftermath of the Michael Brown incident. This already sets context for what issues are going to be prominent in the book. Octavian is black man teaching troubled youths, when he receives a message from his old friend Bones, announcing that Rahsaan’s Records is closing down and that Octavian is invited to attend a farewell party for the store. Mina is a white woman and a single mother who lost herself in trying to please her ex-husband. Readers are repeatedly reminded that St Louis is the kind of town where the white people and the black people live separately; Rahsaan’s is the only space where it doesn’t matter what someone’s skin colour, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, etc. is. It’s a neutral space that dispels these differences and unites people through a love for music.

Music, particularly hiphop, plays a huge role in this book. It’s not just what brings Octavian and Mina, along with all their friends working at Rahsaan’s, together, but also as an experience that transcends the differences humans are so determined to find in each other. Place that amid the racial tensions looming in the present of Michael Brown’s death and permeating the past and the forces that put pressure on Octavian and Mina’s relationship because of their racial differences. Despite how unconventional Mina, the other characters repeatedly remind her that she’s white, that as empathetic as she is, she will never see the world through the eyes of a minority. The scenes of police violence (e.g. when Octavian and his brother are ambushed by policemen simply for wandering their own neighbourhoods at night) while they almost seem like templates, are repeated that way precisely to emphasis how common these instances are, even today. Mina’s friends, most of them coloured folk, repeatedly tell her that as much she doesn’t have the same kind of prejudice most of her kind seem to have, she will never have to experience the violence and dehumanisation that even law-enforcers inflict on black people simply as an exercise of power and privilege.

There you are is a story about Octavian who is having trouble dealing with his brother's life and death. It is a novel about growing up in St. Louis and racial issues. It is about friendship, love, and music.

I like author's writing style and the story kept me engaged from the beginning to end.

There You Are. Simple right? This story is told in retrospect by two people who were friends as five year olds, eventual lovers, and finally estranged in later years. It is a powerful story of love, hate, prejudice, the haves and have nots and it is all based around a record store where the color of your skin made no difference, it was only in a person actions that reflected who they were.

I can’t say enough wonderful things about the characters in this story. I either liked, sympathized or empathized with each of them. They were expertly developed and their life lessons delivered in living color for our reflection.

There are no race revelations here, just issues to ponder and sad reminders that we haven’t done near enough or come far enough in the area of skin color prejudices. Clearly when we are five years old, we see no color, only another human like ourselves. Then slowly color seems to come into view. As time passes, individual attitudes and judgement about skin color are taught or passed on even to people who say they have no prejudices like Mina’s mom. Mina herself prejudice as she states she hates “white people”.

Although race is not an original topic, the premise of this book set in a record store (we all had one of these during the 60’s and 70’s) was nostalgic and different. I really enjoyed the book and buzzed right through it I was so invested in each character and their lives.

Thank you Netgalley and publisher for an ARC of this book.

Really enjoyed this story. Loved the song references, and having a friend that is very into vinyl, that part made perfect sense.
Have visited many American cities and outlying areas as a tourist, and obviously watched events in the news. Refreshing to read something with varying viewpoints, but it strengthens the story rather than spoiling it.

This story hit me in ways I just wasn’t prepared for. It discusses race, anxiety, grief, and so much more in such a honest way that I had to reread some pieces at times because I wanted to be sure that the words had sunk in. The characters are flawed and real and I really appreciated seeing them develop and make mistakes while learning from them. The way music is a focus in this book was so well done, and it made me realize the power it can hold in bringing people together.