Book Review: ‘Hot Wax’ by ML Rio (an American rock ’n’ roll road trip)

It’s no secret that we’re big fans of ML Rio at The Dark Academicals and ‘Hot Wax’ was a whirlwind of a novel.

A vivid and immersive tale of one woman's reckless mission to make sense of the events that shattered her childhood, and made her who she is.

Summer, 1989: ten-year-old Suzanne is drawn like a magnet to her father's forbidden world of electric guitars and tricked-out cars. When her mother remarries, she jumps at the chance to tag along on the concert tour that just might be Gil and the Kills' wild ride to glory. But fame has sharper fangs than anybody realized, and as the band blazes up the charts, internal power struggles set Gil and his group on a collision course destined for a bloody reckoning - one shrouded in mystery and lore for decades to come.

The only witness to a desperate act of violence, Suzanne spends the next twenty-nine years trying to disappear. She trades the music and mayhem of her youth for the quiet of the suburbs and the company of her mild-mannered husband Rob. But when her father's sudden death resurrects the troubled past she tried so hard to bury, she leaves it all behind and hits the road in search of answers. Hitching her fate and Gil's beloved car to two vagabonds who call an old Airstream trailer home, she finds everything she thought she'd lost forever: desire, adventure, and the woman she once wanted to be. But Rob refuses to let her go. Determined to bring her back where she belongs, he chases her across the country - and drives her to a desperation all her own.

Drenched in knock-down drag-out rock and roll, Hot Wax is a raucous, breakneck ride to hell and back - where getting lost might be the only way to find yourself and save your soul.

Set between Side A - Suzanne in 1989, and Side B - Suzanne twenty-nine years later as she attempts to piece herself and her life back together, with a few excursions into other pieces of the life between A and B, ‘Hot Wax’ is a novel that kept me gripped the whole way through. Often with a dual timeline novel, there’s a timeline that I’m more interested or invested in, but not this time because both were so important to the unravelling of what happened to Suzanne and what was going to happen.

The build up to the reveals and the inevitable fallout was a slow, steady burn, that I will admit made the beginning of the book rather slow to get started, that ratcheted up the tension in pace with the rising heat as adult Suzanne drove across the Deep South and into the desert. It’s filled with flashes: of fear, of joy, of freedom, of panic, of grief, and of finding herself and her home again.

‘Hot Wax’ is a fascinating intersection of running from yourself, and running towards the possibility of a future and a future home. Suzanne is lost and haunted by a past that she’s never really come to terms with.

The atmosphere that surrounds this late coming-of-age and the contrast with the grungy rock ‘n’ roll of the 80s is absolutely spot on and that’s what I really hoped for from ‘Hot Wax’.

Thank you to Wildfire and NetGalley for the review copy.