SEARCHING FOR JIMMY PAGE

In this debut novel, a young woman’s search for details about her dead mother leads her to a guitar hero.

February 1988. As the winter wind blows through the pines of Eastern North Carolina, 18-year-old Luna Kane sits with her dying great-grandfather. The man has not spoken for nine years, not since Luna’s mother died by suicide, but he now delivers his final words—cryptic sentences about owls and music. The words spark a long-buried memory in Luna: an image of her hippie mother, Claudia, and a black-and-white photograph of a rock star. “The two of them were intertwined in my mind’s eye,” narrates Luna, “like ashes wafting in a summer wind, waiting for water to receive them. I was born of water and moonlight, and of her and of him.” The rock star is Jimmy Page, the legendary Led Zeppelin guitarist. As a high school graduation present, Luna’s uncle gives her a copy of Jimmy’s first solo record, which prompts a fainting spell and another vision. It seems Jimmy’s music is a means to unlock the secrets of Claudia’s life, granting Luna access to the mother she barely knew. To find out the whole truth about Claudia and her own origins, Luna will have to go to England and meet the man himself. Despite the pop culture premise, Hallberg treats the story with absolute seriousness, delving into the complex psychologies of Luna and her mother. The prose is sometimes overwrought, but always moody and surprising, as here when Luna examines the residence where the Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham died: “I stared at the main house. There were others on the estate, by the banks of the Thames, the river’s edge, swans floating in the freezing water. Swan song for a drummer. What about the owls? Had there been owls crying in the night when Bonzo died, hovering at the window, watching him, waiting? Where had Jimmy been?” The novel is strangely gripping, and fans of Led Zeppelin, in particular, will enjoy how the author has woven the band’s mythology through Luna’s odyssey. Unfortunately, it treads too often into melodrama. Readers just want to have fun, but Hallberg and Luna aren’t interested in levity.

An intriguing but brooding coming-of-age tale.