INDIGO BLUES

The aftermath of Indigo and Adam’s three-month romance—she sheds a clingy boy, moving on without a backward glance, while he pines away with nothing but his guitar for comfort until he channels heartbreak into an impossibly catchy hit song—is chronicled here, he-said/she-said–style, to very limited effect. After “Indigo Blues” hits number one, Adam still wishes for a second chance with Indigo, and she deeply resents the intrusion into her privacy that comes with being shoved headlong into the limelight. Does this blip of a failed high-school relationship truly merit the Rashomon treatment? Alternating voices should be repartee writ large—one-upping, highlighting or undercutting each other, not merely tossing the narrative ball back and forth. Robin Benway’s Audrey, Wait! (2008) canvasses the same topic with far more style and substance, while David Levithan’s dual-voiced collaborations with Rachel Cohn and John Green have yielded more satisfying plots and better-developed characters. Pass. (Fiction. YA)