Fantastic story for 12-18 year old Queer youth coming into themselves. YA Fiction is challenging—the complexity of taking grand concepts of trauma and turning them into something palatable for children and young adults is quite the feat. “The Music of What Happens” does that incredibly well.
The only reason I rate the performance slightly lower is because of the choice in narrators of the audiobook. Male-to-male romance novels often feature a very masculine presenting, deep voiced, reader, and a more feminine presenting, flamboyant reader. The book itself sort of functions in that sphere, but it also does some REALLY hard work to deconstruct the ideology that male-to-male romantic relationships need to mimic heterosexuality. It would have been much more interesting to get two readers that felt more in line with that.