Every year, it seems, I read a book that sucks me in and makes me take notice. It makes me power through it despite fatigue, work, other things to do, and it does so by sheer strength of will. It’s a story that needs to be read.

Enter Tyler McMahon’s 2011 debut, How The Mistakes Were Made, a book I picked up because of a cool-looking cover.

Let’s cut to the chase: this book was brilliant.

It follows punk legend Laura Loss, formerly of the legendary underground punk band, Second Class Citizens. From 1981 to 1984, as part of SCC, Laura, along with her brother Anthony, and fellow bandmates Hank and Billy spearheaded the independent scene in Washington, D.C. Fast-forward six years, and 24-year-old Laura has just quit another band in Seattle, when she comes across Sean and Nathan, buddies she had met at a show months before who now want to form a band. They have a great sound and are bolstered by a secret weapon – a neurological condition that allows Sean to see music as colors, making his guitar play simply sublime. And over the course of a year, this new band, The Mistakes, are the signature band of this new sound emerging from the Seattle area, bigger than these four guys from Aberdeen with a funny sounding band name (Nirvana. He means Nirvana.) However, internal pressures, sudden fame, and a love triangle threaten to tear the band apart, and Sean’s miracle condition has its own drawbacks. And before we know it, we’re watching how The Mistakes were unmade as well.

Mistakes is part rock mockumentary, part tortured confession, told in first-person by Laura, the bands drummer who is widely blamed for The Mistakes’ epic flame-out. It succeeds by not only showing Laura as a reliable narrator able to look at even the most personal bits of this objectively, but interspersing and directly correlating the trajectory of her new band with her old one, though with The Mistakes, it’s played out on a much larger scale. The prose is tight and the characterization is strong. I especially liked the way she came across people from her former bands, from her former life, on opposite trajectories from The Mistakes’ meteoric rise.

To say I was pleasantly surprised is a horrific understatement: How The Mistakes Were Made is going to be hard to beat as the best book I’ve read this year.

Rating: 5 stars

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