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A bighearted debut novel about queer yearning, indie musicians, and bushwacking a thorny path back to your first love.
Jamie is bad at endings, which is why she's stuck at a dead-end Baltimore newspaper job, continuing to have break-up sex with her first-ever hetero partner, and haunted by the what-ifs of her ex-girlfriend Mari—a charismatic and brilliant musician—and their former band together, the Maidenheads. Since they (and their band) broke up a decade ago, Jamie hasn't been able to sing.
Then an unexpected opportunity to perform in DC with Mari's successful new band arises, and Jamie jumps at it. What begins as a return to music becomes a reckoning—with the weight of unfinished love, the voice she long buried, and her own complicated past. But as Jamie channels more of her energy into the band, other threads in her life begin to fray, and she must make some urgent choices about her future.
Electric, spine-tingling, and filled to the brim with tenderness and honesty, The Maidenheads is a novel about the tenacity of first love, the life-changing power of music, and the difficult, necessary work of becoming yourself.
"This novel is a love letter to the music scene of the early 2000s that fans of grunge, indie rock, and pop punk will undoubtedly love. It's also a deeply moving and undeniably sexy take on self-discovery and reinvention, hammering home the idea that it's never too late to start over and that coming-of-age has no age limit. A delightful, messy, heartfelt, and punk rock queer love story." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"[A] big-hearted debut ... The sheer joy of making music comes through on every page, as does Jamie's determination to be herself. Indie music fans should snatch this up." —Publishers Weekly
"A standout debut with an impeccable voice. This is a memorable story about music, love, and self-discovery. I was hooked from page one." —Emily Austin, author of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead
"Benny B. Peterson's The Maidenheads is so much more than a music novel. This is an audacious and tender debut about the many long arcs that make up a life: the arc of self-discovery, of love, of art-making, of losing and forgiving your friends. Is it ever possible, Peterson asks, to recapture a life you abandoned? And why does nostalgia always turn into a trap? The Maidenheads is a smart, intoxicating bop of a novel." —Isle McElroy, author of People Collide
This information about The Maidenheads was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Benny B. Peterson (they/them) is a writer and editor based near Washington, DC. A contributing editor at Washingtonian magazine, they have also worked at Foreign Policy, the New Republic, and Street Sense, DC's street newspaper. They have written about culture, politics, gender, and LGBTQ+ issues for The New York Times, Washington Post, Elle, Slate, and The Atlantic, among other places, and received an MFA in fiction from Bennington.
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