The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto

Everyone joins a band in life. 3.75 stars .

For the first ~150 pages it was a 4.5 stars for me. The plot was so perfectly laid out and interwoven. It was clear that the author did not write a single word until the outline of his story was complete and no guess work was done. The only issue I had was the cheesy narration which is fine, I can easily get over.

But this book was long and the more it dragged out, the more flimsy the plotline was and the more it relied on weird coincidences and random people doing things for the main character who basically floated through life.

The romantic trope was yuck in a lot of places, too.

Wowowow. Such a heartfelt and gorgeous book. I've read a few Albom books before and this one is definitely my favorite. All his characters have so much depth and are truly beautiful subjects. This book brought together so many eras of music history into one concise, incredible story. I highly recommend and I will definitely be reading this again soon.

Before I start my unnecessary rant, I want to say that this book wasn't terrible, and the author has a unique story here. It just wasn't what I was expecting in a historical fiction.

This book was a little frustrating to me. I absolutely love music, especially the music scene during 50s-70s, as it's a benchmark of my taste today, but this book left me unsatisfied with an almost flawless main character that is a short-lived rewrite of music legends of the past.

Frankie Presto is a very lucky man who meets some of the greatest musicians on every other chapter. The story imitates a tour of music of the past that you might find at Universal Studios, which can be great for a lot of people. Not much me, even though I love Universal, just not in book form.

Frankie became uninteresting to me halfway through the story. Not much of a spoiler, but there is a pivotal moment for me where the love interest's sister makes a point how she's never seen anyone more in love with each other than Frankie and her sister, even more so than herself and her husband of 40+ years... I just can't imagine my own sister-in-law saying she doesn't love her husband as much as me and my wife. I started questioning my thoughts of the story at this point.

What is pretty cool about this story is that the author also narrated the audiobook and he's actually pretty good at it too.

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Audio read by: Mitch Albom and a full cast