Meriano's sophomore novel might hit the right notes with the right audience

      After her debut novel This Is How We Fly, Anna Meriano returns to the YA stage with a kind of spin-off book featuring Ellen’s half-sister, Yasmín. Filled with high school angst and drama, It Sounds Like This (which comes out on August 2nd) takes readers into the inner workings of high school marching band!
     Yasmín Treviño didn’t have much of a freshman year thanks to Hurricane Humphrey, but she’s ready to take sophomore year by storm. That means mastering the marching side of marching band—fast!—so she can outshine her BFF Sofia as top of the flute section, earn first chair, and impress both her future college admission boards and her comfortably unattainable drum major crush Gilberto Reyes. But Yasmín steps off on the wrong foot when she reports an anonymous gossip Instagram account harassing new band members and accidentally gets the entire low brass section suspended from extracurriculars. With no low brass section, the band is doomed, so Yasmín decides to take things into her own hands, learn to play the tuba, and lead a gaggle of rowdy freshman boys who are just as green to marching and playing as she is. She’ll happily wrestle an ancient school tuba if it means fixing the mess she might have caused. But when the secret gossip Instagram escalates their campaign of harassment and the end-of-semester band competition grows near, things at school might be too hard to bear. Luckily, the support of Yasmín’s new section—especially new section leader Bloom, a sweet and shy ace boy who might be a better match for her than Gilberto—might just turn things around.
     This book had a lot of characters I wasn’t a fan of and the plot felt a little drawn out in the beginning; however, once I got about halfway through the book, the storyline picked up a bit and some of the characters became likable.
     The marching band theme of the book was interesting to learn about, since I never did marching band as a teenager, and it gave an inner look at the dedication band kids have to make many moving parts into a cohesive piece of art. This book also touched upon themes of sexuality, bullying, peer pressure, and mental health which made it a pretty relevant read.
     Ultimately, the story was okay... I don't think I'll be reading any of Meriano’s other books in the future just because the struggle to get into the story wasn’t worth the ending in my opinion. However, a younger reader might feel differently than I did.

*I received an ARC from Penguin Teen in exchange for my honest review.

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