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Drummer Girl by Ginger Scott Series: Standalone Novel
Published by Self Published on 7/30/19
Genres: Contemporary Romance
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rizona Wakefield was a beat without a melody. Living a half-breathing life in a half-finished neighborhood with parents who always wore half-hearted smiles, the high school senior only had one thing that let her color outside her family’s perfectly drawn lines—her drums.
Jesse Barringer was a song without a chorus. The son of a washed-up rock star who’s also one hell of a deadbeat dad, he was given two things from his father—musical genius and a genetic link to the bipolar disorder that drives him mad.
One night in a garage at the end of a cul-de-sac in the middle of a bankrupt California neighborhood, Jesse’s melody found Arizona’s rhythm. An angry boy with storm-colored eyes found a blonde angel in Doc Martens with missing lines in her own story. Where her rhythm stopped, his words took over, and together, they wrote one hell of a story.
** Drummer Girl is a mature YA/New Adult romance that touches on mental health, drug abuse and includes mature sexual situations.
What keeps me returning to Ginger Scott again and again is the way she so meticulously weaves lush romance with heavy subject matter. Drummer Girl, a mature YA romance set against the backdrop of music, it’s a love story full of hope and heartfelt attraction, where the sweet levity of first love melds painfully with the profound weight of mental illness.
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Jessica’s Review
Nothing about anything in this life is normal, but maybe that’s everyone’s story. Maybe normal is the odd man out.
What keeps me returning to Ginger Scott again and again is the way she so meticulously weaves lush romance with heavy subject matter. Drummer Girl, a mature YA romance set against the backdrop of music, it’s a love story full of hope and heartfelt attraction, where the sweet levity of first love melds painfully with the profound weight of mental illness.
Ginger Scott is the most amazing writer and storyteller and with Drummer Girl comes some of her most important work yet. This story twists and turns, revealing the trauma and pain from both Arizona and Jesse’s pasts while vividly illustrating the ways mental illness has effected both their lives. Rife with jaw dropping curveballs and blistering emotion, Drummer Girl sends such a loud and clear message about what it means to be “normal,” the importance of seeking help and the beauty in finding someone to see you through it all. This is such a great read, a beautifully romantic story, but more, it’s an eye opening account of the normalization of mental health.
What Scott does here feels so relatable and raw. The mother in me took one look at Jesse Barringer and wanted Arizona Wakefield to run the other way. His detachment, his seemingly erratic behavior, his impulsive attitude and his dysfunctional family made me want to shake this girl. He’s the quintessential bad boy next door. He’s in a band, smokes pot, skips school and steamrolls in just in time to ruin important moments in her life. This is not the boy you want for your daughter. But when the true Jesse starts to reveal himself, when his inner turmoil and his invisible fight come to the surface, I just wanted to hold him. I wanted Arizona to fall head first. The biggest thing I took away from this book was the truth that we’re all battling something. We all have our ‘lakes’ and while they might not all look the same, we deserve understanding while we navigate it.
The stigma of mental illness is stripped away on these pages, opening the eyes and heart of the reader. The way I felt about that reckless bad boy and the good girl who appeared to have it all together morphed and changed as this story evolved. Drummer Girl invites you inside these characters and then turns everything upside down after you’ve made your assumptions about what normal looks like. It’s so well done, so authentic in its teen angst and relatable drama, so sweet at times and so heavy at others. The romance and the intoxicating draw of first love is perfectly peppered with the weight of real world problems and I thoroughly enjoyed it… But more importantly, I appreciated it.
Excerpt
He lands in a partial run, the fall maybe more than he expected. Maybe not.
Maybe he’s always falling.
He’s a hurricane.
Rabbit hole.
His steps toward me are slow and deliberate, the saunter of a drunken Johnny Depp pirate, but the closer he gets the more clarity I see in his eyes. It’s calm Jesse today. Sweet Jesse, maybe.
Sorry Jesse, for certain.
My mouth twitches caught between my want to fall apart and my anger at myself that I want to smile and don’t deserve to. He stops about a half dozen steps from me, maybe less. No words. He doesn’t say “hi” or “sorry.” He just stands there, fingers halfway in his front pockets, thumbs out, arms loose and relaxed while he looks at me and raises one side of his mouth.
“Kiss me.” His eyes flicker with his command. It comes out soft and sweet, a short nod to his head in an attempt to draw me near, get me to walk the remaining few feet.
I laugh out once.
“I don’t want to.” I shake my head in a barely noticeable movement.
“Liar,” he calls me out, smirk growing.
I stare into his blue eyes, cloudy with the day. It’s humid out, even with the slight winter chill. His eyes look like a storm. Mine are just black. Sometimes my deep brown matches my heart, and I know that’s the color they are right now.
“Yeah, I know. But fuck you.” I challenge him, and his eyes flare with this new tone I cast. My chest is vibrating with tummy nerves and the patter of my heart and adrenaline. My feet have started to float, my chin lifting in part defiance and preparation for my lips that so desperately want to be kissed. How can I want to kiss him? I’m still mad at him. I just don’t know exactly why.
“You mean fuck them,” Jesse finally says, and I laugh out the saddest laugh of my life.
I nod, and my right eye burns with the welling tear. I rub it, smearing it on my skin.
“Yeah, I do,” I say, stepping into him.
He meets me half way, hands finding their perfect home on either cheek, thumbs under my eyes, long fingers into my hair, mouth on mine hard and fast. He walks me back two or three steps, and I lean with the force as I inhale him and his kiss. I wrap my hands around his wrists and taste him. There’s a sweetness to his lips, like sugar or honey, and I let it soothe me like medicine.
About the Author:
Ginger Scott is an Amazon-bestselling and Goodreads Choice Award-nominated author of several young and new adult romances, including Waiting on the Sidelines, Going Long, Blindness, How We Deal With Gravity, This Is Falling, You and Everything After, The Girl I Was Before, Wild Reckless, Wicked Restless and In Your Dreams.
A sucker for a good romance, Ginger’s other passion is sports, and she
often blends the two in her stories. (She’s also a sucker for a hot quarterback, catcher, pitcher, point guard…the list goes on.) Ginger has been writing and editing for newspapers, magazines and blogs for more than 15 years. She has told the stories of Olympians, politicians, actors, scientists, cowboys, criminals and towns. For more on her and her work, visit her website at http://www.littlemisswrite.com.
When she’s not writing, the odds are high that she’s somewhere near a baseball diamond, either watching her son field pop flies like Bryce Harper or cheering on her favorite baseball team, the Arizona Diamondbacks. Ginger lives in Arizona and is married to her college sweetheart whom she met at ASU (fork ’em, Devils).
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