My first thought for this book was: how could I not read something with a title as awesome as that? The second was: how can I even think of reading something that implies death in its title so soon after the emotional trauma I went through with One Day? Because you are reading this review, you know I took the risk of heartbreak and read it anyway.

By writing about two characters who are both intense, passionate, and more than a little damaged, Tiffanie DeBartolo managed to keep me reading even when I belatedly realized that the story wasn’t going in the direction I wanted it to. Eliza and Paul are the backbone of this book. She lost her parents to a plane crash when she was fourteen, and so she is deathly afraid to fly. She tried to kill herself when she was sixteen only to find herself again in the song “The Day I Became a Ghost”. Doug Blackman, the song’s writer and singer, became her personal god and savior. Paul is a musician with two things in excess: talent and integrity. He shuns fame and success because he would rather die than become a sellout. Paul has the makings to become the next Doug Blackman if he would only learn to compromise. As it is, his sense of integrity (which can also be interpreted as plain musical snobbishness) is also leading to his self-destruction. When Paul and Eliza meet, sparks fly. I’m glad to note that this is one of those books that have the main pairing get together early on. The angst (and there is plenty of it) makes its appearance later on. I struggled to understand Eliza and Paul’s choices in the second half of the book, and while I do not agree with most of them, I knew at the back of my mind that their actions were consistent with their character’s strengths and flaws. Told in Eliza and Paul’s alternating voices and interspersed with the occasional point of view of a secondary character, I was partial to Paul’s narration. His voice is often angry and tortured, but his words, as is the mark of the prodigious song writer that he supposedly is, have an almost lyrical and poetic quality to them.

How to Kill a Rock Star tries to take on the big things- love, fear, sacrifice, death, salvation. This is a book ripe with metaphors, and who better to use in illustrating all of the above than Jesus Christ the Savior? I have to admit that there were times when I felt uncomfortable with the parallelism Eliza sees between Paul and Jesus. I consider myself a pretty liberal Catholic, but there is something seriously disturbing about Eliza conjuring the image of Jesus’ body on the cross when she looks at her boyfriend’s naked sleeping form. Barring those unwelcome imageries, I thought the writing was pretty solid. The first half was very impressive and I had high hopes for the rest of the book. Unfortunately, I felt the second half took a nosedive. I also had problems with the believability of the twist, but all’s well that ends well and while I wasn’t completely satisfied with the ending, I would say it was happy enough.

All in all, this is a love story on two levels. On the forefront, this is the story of Paul and Eliza, two lost people who found refuge in each other. On the background, this is the story of their individual love affair with music. How to Kill a Rock Star is a celebration of the power of one song to transform a life. Music helped Paul and Eliza save themselves long before they learned to save one another.

After reading this I wanted to check out DeBartolo’s other book, God-shaped Hole (she sure has a knack for coming up with awesome titles), but reading the teaser made me want to run in the opposite direction.
“When I was twelve, a fortune teller told me that my one true love would die young and leave me all alone. Everyone said she was a fraud, that she was just making it up.
I'd really like to know why the hell a person would make up a thing like that.”
Sounds like a recipe for heartache.