Some Strange Music Draws Me In is a beautiful exploration of adolescence and aging. Filled with the lingering echoes of a former self, Hansbury has created a rich portrayal of moving forward in all of life's messy glory while wrangling with a painful past. Max and Mel will leave you reeling with emotion, transformed and hopeful. Like a good song, this is a novel that will play on your mind for years to come, humming brightly and freely.--Andrés N. Ordorica, author of How We Named the Stars
This funny, defiant, and passionate novel will make you want to play Patti Smith's "Horses" at full volume as a soundtrack while you're still reading. Some Strange Music Draws Me In is the coming-of-age, reckoning-with-gender story we have all needed for decades, the kind that can change and save your life.--James Hannaham, author of Didn't Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta
This is a touchstone LGBTQIA+ coming of age novel containing superbly drawn characters, a brilliant story, and knowing prose that constantly seeks to complicate simplistic narratives around gender, sexuality, and class.--Alexander Moran "Booklist (starred review)"
Some Strange Music Draws Me In is luminous, propulsive, tender.... Griffin Hansbury's prose is both scathing and soulful, delivered with care and grace and aplomb. This novel's warmth is palpable, and Hansbury has crafted a truly rare thing--a gift and a guide.--Bryan Washington, author of Family Meal, Memorial, and Lot
Some Strange Music Draws Me In is a story of how latent queerness can point toward the exit from poverty and despair. It's about intergenerational queer care, about how even with a clean getaway we nurse our wounded pasts.... [A] book filled with compassion.--McKenzie Wark, author of Love and Money, Sex and Death
God damn I loved this book. It's tough and sweet and smart about the places we come from and how we fight and flail to discover ourselves inside them. Griffin Hansbury has achingly captured the miracle of queer generations seeing and saving each other, without hiding the real struggle to connect across generations, our different times and traumas. A gorgeous novel readers will absolutely live inside of. I will be thinking about Max and Sylvia for a long time, they are now so dear to me.--CJ Hauser, author of The Crane Wife and Family of Origin
This gorgeous, propulsive novel is filled with beauty and danger, youth and wisdom, and the lifesaving lifelines of counterculture. With writing so tense and honest and real, I recognized this place and these people deeply, and felt them all in my heart long after the book was finished.--Michelle Tea, author of Knocking Myself Up