Remix by Non Pratt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I’ve no inclination to go to a music festival. I’ve never had an inclination to go to a music festival. I’ve gone to gigs of course, ranging from ceilidhs through to Wembley but the idea of a festival and me just doesn’t click. At all.
But Pratt’s second novel, the vivid and intense Remix has made me think twice about that.
I had a lot of time for Trouble, Pratt’s debut novel, and as such came to Remix with some excitement. I like how Pratt writes; I like her honesty, her sympathy and that vivid, rich empathy she has for her characters – flawed, beautiful, real. Remix proves that Pratt gets the complexities of teenage life; those relationships brittle and fluid, sharp and clean, contradictions, all, butting up against each other and reshaping themselves with every word spoken and every look given and missed.
It is a teenage world madly removed from the one I experienced or knew but that doesn’t make it untrue or inaccurate. In the world of Remix, that heightened feverish music high, it is so true that it aches. For the period of the weekend that the novel’s set, everything that happens happens within the bubble of Remix. The world lives within the festival. It burns. People make decisions, wise or otherwise, and they are decisions that matter within those moments. In a way, they’re the only decisions that could have been made and it’s right to allow them to happen. I admire Pratt’s writing in how it gives space and truth to this world whilst similarly recognising the unreality of it. The way that the events of the weekend will have to be confronted. The way that the future will have to be faced. Sometime. Soon. But not today. Right now, it’s about the moment, and that’s where Remix shines. That vivid, bullheaded, beautiful, fleeting, perfect moment.
It is a good book.
Daisy May Johnson 