This Bird Has Flown, the first novel from musician Susanna Hoffs (the Bangles, Ming Tea), is a pop confection that's too substantive to qualify as bubblegum and too much fun to qualify as emo. Call it power pop with soul.
As the novel begins, 33-year-old singer-songwriter and lifelong Angeleno Jane Start is in a bad way: not only is she in the "Where are they now?" files, but her filmmaker boyfriend has just left her for (what else?) a young lingerie model. This has precipitated both a mortifying move back into her parents' house and grudging participation in an embarrassing cash grab: Jane finds herself at a Las Vegas bachelor party karaoke-ing her lone, 10-year-old hit song.
Desperate to get away and dedicate some time to songwriting, Jane accepts an offer to stay at her British manager and best friend Pippa's London flat. On the flight to Heathrow, Jane sits next to Tom Hardy, a dreamy Oxford professor of English literature who has never heard of her; for Jane, this is, as she later reflects, "liberating." After the flight, Jane gives Tom her number, and they eventually meet up and play house in Oxford.
Hoffs injects moments of exhilaration into the routine humiliations of fallen stardom. This Bird Has Flown has sex, drugs/drink, rock and roll, and also a screwball comedy's worth of misunderstandings and a bona fide crisis of conscience. Although there's always the air of inevitability hovering over a rom-com--is there really any doubt that the couple at its center will ultimately unite?--Hoffs is too good to end on the note that readers are listening for. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer