EVERY TIME YOU HEAR THAT SONG

An ambitious teen reporter sees solving a superstar’s mystery as a way out of being stuck in her small Southern town.

Aspiring reporter Darren Purchase, a white bisexual 17-year-old, wants nothing more than to escape Mayberry, Arkansas, even if it means leaving the comfortable companionship of her neighbor’s front porch and no longer listening to country music legend Decklee Cassel with her mom. Recently deceased Decklee, who was from Mayberry herself, famously spent the last 50 years creating a time capsule to be revealed after her death—but when it’s opened, it turns out to be empty. Then the local radio station plays a prerecorded message from Decklee introducing a scavenger hunt to find the time capsule contents and claim a $3 million prize. Darren and Kendall Wilkinson, the brown-skinned boy she’s known since second grade and her gas station co-worker, team up to solve the mystery, embarking on a once-in-a-lifetime road trip across the South. The chapters alternate between the evocative first-person perspectives of Darren in the present day and Decklee from the 1960s until shortly before her death; on the way, she climbs the ladder of the music industry and reckons with the personal cost of stardom. Lesbian Decklee, with her trademark curly blond hair and sequined costumes, navigates an unfair world and heterosexist expectations. The parallel narratives are richly vivid and expertly woven together into an unexpected conclusion.

Discoveries of love, legacy, and self take center stage in this musical tapestry of a novel.