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Title: To Be Someone

Author: Louise Voss

Narrator: Caitlin Thorburn

Format: Unabridged

Length: 13 hrs and 53 mins

Language: English

Release date: 06-06-17

Publisher: Audible Studios

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary

Publisher's Summary:

Helena Nicholls - ex world-famous pop star and prime-time DJ - wakes up in hospital to find her looks, her career and her personal life in tatters. She has been let down by her boyfriend, and the one person she loved most in the world - her best friend since the age of five - is dead. She feels that she belongs nowhere, and her sense of identity, fragile at the best of times, is in pieces. So Helena turns to the one thing that has always got her through, the one thing that has real resonance: music. And she begins to concoct The Plan.

Using the request format that made her radio show so popular, where listeners rang in with detailed stories about why certain songs were so meaningful for them, she sets out the story of her own life, chapter by chapter, track by track. Thinking about the songs that represent important chapters in her own life, Helena begins to come to terms with her past. But the present is more of a problem as, while in hospital, she has re-met an old friend to whom she is still hugely attracted. Her strict adherence to The Plan, however, means that time is not on her side. If she is to have a future at all, she must work out what it really means To Be Someone.

With its wry, appealing narrative voice, and its insider's take on the world of pop music, To Be Someone is a stunningly mature first novel which swings with wide smoothness between past and present, child and adulthood, joy and tragedy, love, loss and the meaning of true friendship.

Members Reviews:

To be someone

I really don't understand PW. The book does draw a surface picture of the main character, however that surface gives you the inner personality that lead to who she is. If you know anything about real people, then you can see the kind of person Helena is at the beginning and how she comes to the conclusion she does. It is completely believable, unless you don't believe that a person can come of out of a grieving process and a personal tragedy stronger than before. Of course, I've had the experience of having someone truly amazing and beautiful in my life and having lost them. I can understand how she felt, what she thought, and what led to her change of heart.

Honestly, I do not get the complaints. The characters do not need to exist outside Helena's perception of them because this is about her journey and her perception and her her her. I think it speaks to how Helena feels at the beginning (self absorbed and internalized). The character's only feeling is the grief for her friend, who has a backstory. Seen from Helena's perception in her grief and tragedy, it makes sense to not care about those outside herself and her friend Sam. She fights against her feelings for Toby and his daughter (I'm sorry, I can't remember the little girl's name right now) and tries to keep them to only a surface perception of them, but finds herself slowly being drawn into them. Fully? No..and here we come to the only real problem I have with this book:

Helena's ending relationship with Toby is just too soon and too Pollyana, IMO. I mean, after a long grieving process and a very serious personal tragedy, instead of seeing the beginning of some tentative bonds and beginnings of a relationship we see a commitment. After the few interactions and the type of self absorbed grieving we've seen, to fully commit to Toby just seems like an ending designed to lazily close the book.