The Music Game

Reviews

“Let’s hear it for an indie sleaze-era novel ... class issues, deep friendship, betrayal, a gender transition and anti-globalization protests. You know, just ~Millennial~ stuff!” —NYLON

“In her debut fiction, Montreal writer Stéfanie Clermont locates a 21st Century equivalent to the 1920s’ “lost generation” in a group of young people trying to find meaning and connection in a world of dead-end jobs, unaffordable housing, and romantic disappointments ... The Music Game inhabits a liminal space between different bodies, psyches and geographies. Its characters can display the worst hipster traits ... and genuine insights into their inner selves and the nature of the world around them. If they share undeniable commonalities with lost generations before them, they are nonetheless, in Clermont’s hands, rendered specific and unique.”—Toronto Star

“The Music Game seems to ask us to return to those vital conversations about the way we have been hurt and about wanting to make things better, even if the room to do that may feel so out of reach. It’s a book that allows us to escape our reality while also somehow facing it head on. It's a reminder of our fundamental interconnectedness, of the loss that still cuts through us every day, and, more than anything else, of the necessity of hope.” —Open Book

“A stunning, incisive immersion into a community of young radical activists finding love, experiencing violence, rejecting hegemony and struggling to survive financially in a world of dead-end jobs.” —Winnipeg Free Press

“[An] audacious, honest, and liberating masterpiece ... The Music Game is about relationships, yet also about all the ways we desperately try to escape reality ... anyone who’s ever experienced depression or anxiety will find healing through Stéfanie’s loyal and beautiful ways of describing the inexplicable. She allows for contradiction; depth and lightness meet in a disturbing but cathartic way.” —Apt613