Debbie Harry Sings in French -- Meagan Brothers

After years of drinking and drugs resulted in a near-fatal overdose, sixteen-year-old Johnny has an epiphany:

I realized I didn't want to sit around in a dark room, in love with the dark. I wanted some new kind of energy. I wanted something good to happen for a change. Maybe that made me sound like a crystal-toting hippie, but so what? Drugs didn't make me happy. Drinking didn't make me happy. Dancing to Blondie, on the other hand, made me feel all right.

Johnny's in love with Debbie Harry. She's tough, she's beautiful, she's cool. And he realizes that it isn't just that he loves those things about her—it's that he wants to be those things. He wants to be like her. To be Debbie Harry. The question is, what does that mean? And how will his new, fantastically cool girlfriend react?

While it wasn't a perfect book—the storyline itself runs in a predictable arc and some of the secondary characters are pretty much just stock characters—Debbie Harry Sings in French was a standout for me for a lot of reasons:

I loved Johnny and Maria, Johnny's uncle and cousin, the record store guy and Cher. 

I loved that Meaghan Brothers used a ton of seventies/eighties references without making the book feel like it should have actually been a memoir or historical fiction. 

I loved that those same music references and Johnny's passion for music made me feel like dancing (or at least bouncing around in my armchair). 

I liked that for almost the entire book, Johnny's exploration of his sexuality was treated with more of the Captain Jack Harkness "why must you people label everything" mentality than the "we must put everybody in a box" mentality. (That one gets a like rather than a love because the box came out at the end.)

I loved the scene where Johnny learns a bit about his father.

I loved (of course) that it made me laugh, but I also loved that it made me get a bit teary as well. 

I loved that Sunday Girl was in my head for days after finishing it.

I loved that the book dealt with big issues but never felt heavy.

Most of all, I loved that everything about the storyline sang Be Who You Are, but without ever feeling like Johnny's story was a vehicle for a message.