You need a good read for the commute or the work from home coffee break in your kitchen, avert your eyes and log out a moment. As we slowly acknowledge that the new normal includes a lonely space, we cannot underestimate the power of escaping in a book, transported to a world you are familiar with. The chick literature is about day to day heroines in realistic situations we can relate to, juggling a career, making poor relationship choices and parental decisions. Trying to have it all. Hence a need for a short read, novella style. Enough to get you involved, but not bogged down when you have a life to tend to. Post pandemic, we may see this kind of fiction spawn a whole host of narratives. Home schooling and working from home was by all accounts pandemic torture 101. Pandemic puppies and family dilemmas next.
The DJ trilogy was penned in what now seems like halcyon days looking back. Without considering feminist sensibilities, before #MeToo and #BLM and #Brexit in the UK. Who can avoid political awareness now? It would be impossible to write without these parameters, acceptable less than only four years ago. The series, a snap shot collection of novellas about late-century modern social norms. The decadent lifestyles rarely acknowledged despite being more common place barely referenced in fiction or pop culture...until now.
Jaqi Loye-Brown attempts to flip the chick lit genre on its head having noticed the lack of chick lit reads set in clubland. Actually zero. Paying particular attention to the house music party scene in the UK since raves took over night clubs, late 80's. Following a quote by the late, great author Toni Morrison If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, you must be the one to write it.
This glaring gap in the market inspired Jaqi to set about generating the club fiction genre, she has coined Rave Lit.
The only content out there were faction, factual, biographies from the DJ's perspective and typically male aspirations. Clubbing is reserved for a minor scene slotted in one episode of a drama series or one chapter in a romantic fiction.
Although the DJ novellas stand alone as good reads in their own right, there are threads continuing from the first to the third books sequentially. Minor characters feature as protagonists as the years roll on. A continuity of unresolved stories turn up unexpectedly.
Jaqi Loye-Brown’s debut novella, with its unapologetic title DJ Whore is set in London in the late 1990s, a modern period piece when the mobile phone was not so smart…and fax machines still existed. An era on the cusp of a digital revolution as post rave-generation women charged up their own destinies in determined to maintain a 'party lifestyle'.
The third in her Portobello Novella series, Jaqi Loye-Brown’s GRAM Mother casts a random eye over the life and loves of the enigmatic Myrtle, a watercolour artist approaching fifty and running on that last little something in the tank. Myrtle’s decadent lifestyle threatens to subjugate the precarious mother and daughter bond as she struggles to bring up teenager Severign in West London.
Why not grab yourself a large Merlot, a side of low fat popcorn and flick a page or two, order now for this time tomorrow.
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