From the first pages, the reader is made to feel the thrill of ambition and possibilities as two girls in their twenties take on NYC with plans to escape the sadness and smallness they’ve observed in women’s lives. They get to know each other in the way we get to know our best friends: feeling at home with each other’s families, saying the deepest and most real things over greasy diner foods and bottles of white wine. And we as readers get to know them in the same way through Bauer’s masterful use of details.

As the characters work as staffers at a music magazine, the setting gives us an inside peek at the music scene and paints an intriguing portrait of New York that is specific to the 1990s. There our characters dream hard and play just as hard, dressed in eclectic thrift-store finds and giving playful names to the looks they put together.

As the main characters grow older, the later portion of the book didn’t work as well for me. I felt I needed to have more details to understand why they made some of the choices that they did about their paths in life, their romantic partnerships, and their changing friendship.

I found myself sometimes wishing for more movement in the plot, but I was always swept away by the gorgeous writing. I also loved the way the novel asks important questions: how to sustain the relationships that matter when the friends whose wants once matched our own make different choices than we do, and how to hold on to the dreams that define us when reality derails what once seemed possible.

Thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the advance read in exchange for my honest review.

I featured this title in a roundup of general fiction publishing in June and linked to a couple of blog groups, posted to Facebook, and sent link to twitter.

Charlotte and Rose met in 1997. This tracks their loves and friendship over the next 20 years but it's from Charlotte's pespective- and she's kind of, how to put this, annoying. The goals of the women were the same when they were young but as they age, you'll see the shift in their focus,. notably when motherhood enters the picture. There isn't really a plot here but rather a series of what you might think of as vignettes. That's not a bad thing but it make this less rewarding than it might have been. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.

Carlene Bauer, Girls They Write Songs About Farrer, Strauss and Giroux 2022.

Thank you NetGalley for providing me with this uncorrected proof in exchange for an honest review.

Carlene Bauer’s novel is a modern approach to women’s friendship. However, where I think of women’s friendship novels as underpinned by a notion of sisterhood that includes warmth and supportiveness, this friendship seems to be spiky, sharp elbowed and verging on envy that I found difficult to appreciate.

I read 30% of the work, dipped into a section on the way in which the marriage and motherhood of one woman impacted on her and the friendship, and read the end. The feature that I did find completely charming is the role of literature (Archie comics and Anne of Green Gables amongst the large range) feminist ideology (Betty Friedan and Shulamith Firestone feature, as well as second wave) and song, with Anne Frank as an imaginary advisor in the developing relationship, which impacted on the women’s conversations and understanding of events.

The novel is written in the first person, with Rose and I as the main characters, surrounded by thoughts of their mothers (they do not want to be like them), concerns with feminism, mad cap escapades and working together and maturing together. The first paragraph is strong, laying out what the women want in their move from home to New York. Rose and I meet at a music magazine. Rose wins the position of staff writer for which I had also applied. Despite Rose’s success both believe that I is the better writer, and this understanding of their relative ability in contrast with their professional status gives their friendship an awkward beginning that underlies the remainder of their time together.

Marriage, attitudes to its permanency and the birth of Rose’s two children impact on the friendship, as does their changing financial status. I is initially the one to lend Rose money; Rose’s marriage changes that dynamic. I becomes a teacher, and writes books; Rose remains married and the friendship changes. The questions at the end of the novel are poignant – is the safety of marriage and financial stability adulthood? Is maintaining a semblance of independence despite fractious love affairs and heartbreaks adulthood? Can women move on and leave their daughters or their girl students something better than the way they have lived?
The novel ends on an image of hope and recognition of sisterhood that is far less fractious than the way in which it began. Carlene Bauer has not written the novel for me. However, it does have some moments that are enticingly pertinent. Possibly it is a work for a younger audience who want some spikiness in their sisterhood.

Excellent lit-heavy book from Carlene Bauer, both about friendship and about growing up and living a life of one's own. A life that doesn't follow along a standard path of marriage, kids, house, dog, and so on.

Charlotte and Rose meet as young women in late 90s New York at a music magazine. While their friendship is all consuming, there is an underlying river of tension and competition between the two. They are as close as family and in each others lives as long as possible.

The chapters speed through the years, through many relationships and affairs, from one city to the other, from one failure to the other. This is another book about female friendship, about toxic female friendship, about motherhood, both of the standard and unconventional kind. It's beautifully written. I feel that it will go above many readers heads but I hope that it will capture even more hearts.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the opportunity to read and review this book.

A meandering wander through one woman’s life. We meet friends, lovers, family, hopes, sorrow, etc.

Overall Charlotte is not the most likable person. She is selfish, idealistic, and judgmental. She wants so much but is in turn, timid or overly reckless.

It struck me that her ideals, particularly about the best way to woman, is narrow. She thinks women should only aspire to be more than wives or mothers. Those roles are pitiful in her view.

The ending is not entirely satisfactory, but I can imagine Charlotte going on in her grumpy life even after.

This book dissects the complex nature of friendship, ambition and jealous in thoughtful and often humorous way. Great stuff!

This is a pleasing novel about making it in the big city and female friendship and what happens when you don't take sufficient care of your friendship.

Girls They Write Songs About successfully captures what life felt like back in the late nineties in big cities across the world.  It also captures what young friendship and fumbling early career and relationship choices feel like with painful accuracy. But it starts to meander around its halfway point, leaving the reader stranded.

Rose and Charlotte meet while working at a music magazine in 1997.   New York and the world at large is in the middle of changing – the city is being cleaned up literally and figuratively.  Rose is bold, with big plans for her future and big belief that she and Charlotte can write amazingly well-done novels that will top their literary heroines (Plath, Didion, Murdoch and Nin, among others, get namedropped). Charlotte has much more conservative ambitions and is very bookish.

They careen through their twenties with abandon, experiencing New York and the men there, winning and losing, experiencing life.  But when Rose starts to settle down – and Charlotte finds herself adrift – can their friendship be saved?

Girls they Write Songs About refuses to give its readers neat, easy moral messages about the women at the center of the book.  Rose ends up with much more than she bargained for; Charlotte jumps into relationships with unavailable men – literally and/or emotionally, and ends up in a different career than she anticipated.  But the two women have each other – until they don’t.

The book’s weakest part comes when they lose each other because Charlotte picks a married lover over continuing their friendship and the rest of the book mainly deals with her angst over this. Part of me wanted more Rose – some chapters from her point of view.  Her personality is so strong that I really wanted to peek directly into her head without Charlotte.  And I wanted to find out what happens to her after the two narratives split into divided roads.

The book captures the spirit of the writing soul, the way one yearns to do more, to do better, but how life sometimes gets in the way.  And New York is a character all in of itself; mid-Disneyfication but pre-9/11, Bauer captures a city in everlasting flux.

In the end, Girls they Write Songs About  is a lovely, credibly portrait of a friendship, but I wanted a little more from it.

Buy it at: Amazon, Audible or your local independent retailer
Visit our Amazon Storefront

A super exciting coming of age novel set to the backdrop of 90's rock and roll in New York City. Shy Charlotte and intense Rose circle one another at their rock magazine first as enemies and then as friends. They team up to tackle the city and make their names. It's fantastic to live vicariously through them as their friendship grows via concerts, parties, and endless nights in bars.

When their dream jobs and famous futures do not materialize, the two make life choices and support each other through major obstacles. This novel describes the friendship between woman and the importance of that bond.
If you love novels of true friends, rock and roll 90's scenes or just want a terrific character study, grab #GirlsTheyWriteSongsAbout. #NetGalley #NetgallyReads #FarrarStrausGiroux

Girls They Write Songs About by Carlene Bauer was a fun read about two young women who came to NYC in 1997, both intending to set the town on fire through their writing. They become the best of friends and then... well, life happens. I was throughout invested in Charlotte & Rose's lives and miss them now! Highly recommend!

This is a memoiresque story which meanders around the memories of Charlotte and the people in her life. I found it plotless and uncomfortable to read. It’s not a style I enjoy and I found it impossible to relate to Charlotte, her friends or her story.

I found the discussion of abortion cringeworthy. For a narrator who is over-analytical, this was just glossed over. This level of insensitivity made me uncomfortable, especially when more time is spent analyzing simple choices.

This was not a book I enjoyed.

Thank you Netgalley for this ARC.

What a great book. I was immediately swept up in it, and I loved the friendship between the main characters. They felt like real people, and their world was immediately real to me. I'll admit that the book faltered a lot for me in the last third or so. Far too much casual cheating and, even though the cheating usually did end the relationship, I can't really abide that sort of thing in my fiction lately (despite the fact I've written it in the past).

That said it's a fantastic read, and I'm proud to have it as my first read of the year.

The writing style was fast paced, which was nice, and it was very atmospheric. But the problem with it is that it was impersonal. I felt like a distant viewer of the characters, not like I was a part of their world or interacting with them. 3/5

Did not finish. This is a book about friendship between 2 women who take jobs at the same agency and become writers. Why do so many novels have protagonists who are writers?

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. Charlotte, shy and studious, and Rose, intimidating and sure of herself, separately have come to NYC in 1997 to set the city on fire with the writing they are going to do. They meet while working at a small rock magazine and type up articles in between going to concerts, to readings, movies, parties, bars and diners where the two of them can figure out what just happened and what they should do next. They end up freelancing, spending times with each other’s families and dating men that don’t make a lasting impression. But the great writing they saw in their future seems to be eluding them as Charlotte starts to teach and Rose marries and has twins. This is such a fun and very sharp and moving portrait of a friendship that takes us all the way to the present.