By Stephanie Kuehnert
[MTV/Pocket Books, 2008. 352 pages. $13.00 paperback.]
Reviewed by Ann Wiens

Catcher in the Rye, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Jane Eyre—we love coming-of-age novels. I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone, the first book by Stephanie Kuehnert, is a coming-of-age novel for the girls-rock generation.

Kuehnert intertwines two story lines throughout the book: The first is about small-town punk-rocker Emily Black’s rocky rise to stardom, from screwing the boys in the band in the parking lot of the local rock club through record deals, dive bars, and progressively brighter lights and larger stages, with plenty of sex and drugs and rock’n’roll along the way. The second is about small-town-girl Emily Black’s search for her mother, who walked away from her family without a word when Emily was four months old. The two come together in Emily’s desperate search to find herself, both in the music that so deeply moves and motivates her, and in the family that feels so incomplete.

The “Emily Black, punk rocker” story is written with such attention to detail that it feels decidedly autobiographical—I may have been reading this book in my living room or on the “L,” but I could see the small-town Wisconsin backyards and basements, smell the sour beer and pre-smoking-ban haze of the Fireside Bowl, and hear the opening chords of She Laughs’ first gig at the Metro as clearly if I were there. The “Emily Black, motherless daughter” story feels as though it’s written from a greater distance, with all the twists and turns and melodramatic pacing of made-for-TV movie—but it’s a compelling, can’t-look-away (or put the book down) made-for-TV movie.

Just as she’s teetering on the brink of punk-rock stardom, Emily ditches her band to criss-cross the country on a quest to find the mother she’s never known, Louisa, who left “to follow the music” and took with her a secret that Emily’s father has kept close for years. It’s a genuinely suspenseful story, which Kuehnert fills with well-developed, quirky characters that we come to feel we know, and often come to care about. And while Emily’s antics may make us want to grab her by the shoulders and shake some sense into her, we know it wouldn’t work. I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone is a coming-of-age novel in the truest sense; Emily starts out a headstrong, angry kid, and we know the only way she’ll make it out the other side is to make each and every mistake herself, as painful as that may be.

Stephanie Kuehnert earned an M.F.A. in fiction writing from Columbia College Chicago in 2003. In high school, she discovered punk rock and produced several D.I.Y. feminist ’zines. Her second novel is in the works.