By contrast, Luce narrates her own chapters, expertly navigating the musical world she escaped into from her Brooklyn Hasidic upbringing, nurturing its many guises.

“The kick drum rose through her bones the bass mimicked her pulse, or her pulse mimicked the bass.” Presented in the third person, Rosemary’s sections are the bildungsroman of a young obsessive mapping her own route. “The guitars swallowed every inch of space in the room, filling the air and replacing the oxygen in her lungs,” Pinsker writes about a show at the 2020. Rosemary’s by-the-book life is blown open in her discovery of music’s physical power. Much of Pinsker’s most vivid and visceral writing comes when she describes her protagonists’ interactions with music.

Her first assignment is in Baltimore, where she walks into an illegal club called (cue: bonus contextual symbolism) 2020 and run by Luce, the scene’s éminence grise. The show is life-changing (“She’d felt for the first time like she was inside a song, that a song was a living thing”), and soon Rosemary starts working for SHL as a talent recruiter, looking for new musicians. Rosemary’s professional competence gets her a bonus in the form of an invitation to her first concert, which in the post-event world are produced as holograms by the entertainment giant StageHoloLive. Her story is juxtaposed with that of Rosemary Laws, a twenty-something music fan we meet years after the event, remotely laboring on the customer service line for an online goods-and-services megacorp from the safety of her parents’ still-quarantined rural home.

Luce’s show becomes famous as the “last concert” before society was ground to a halt. A Song for a New Day introduces readers to the punky singer-songwriter with a budding hit on the eve of a sold-out headlining show, which takes place the same night as a catastrophic nationwide event (part terrorist act, part virus outbreak, but never fully explored). Reimagining society through song is certainly among the guiding principles espoused by Luce Cannon.

A song for a new day by sarah pinsker