Title: Escaping Indigo (Escaping Indigo: Book One)
Author: Eli Lang
Publisher: Riptide Publishing
Length: 221 Pages
Category: New Adult, Contemporary
At a Glance: Escaping Indigo is a good story that could have been better if the author had allowed for less introspective analyzing and more dialoguing between the main characters.
Reviewed By: Sammy
Blurb: Micah thought he’d always be in a band. All he ever wanted was to play drums and make great music, but when his best friend and bandmate passes away, Micah is left adrift. The thing that’s always lifted him up is now a reminder of everything he’s lost
In an attempt to put his life back together, Micah takes a job as roadie for his favorite band, Escaping Indigo. He’s always admired the lead singer, Bellamy. On stage, Bellamy is confident, glittery, and radiant. But as the two grow closer, Micah realizes that in person, Bellamy is quiet, introspective, and a little uncertain. And that’s the person Micah is falling for.
Micah is determined to know all of Bellamy, both the rock star side and the side hidden from the audience, the side that creates music that touches Micah’s heart. Bellamy has secrets of his own, though, things he doesn’t want to share with anyone. And trying to uncover Bellamy’s truths might be the thing that ends up pushing him away.
Review: Micah has lost his best friend, and with it his deep, driving desire to make music as a drummer in a band. Now signed on as a roadie, Micah finds himself face-to-face with the lead musician, Bellamy, who he has both fantasized about and regarded as almost a musical god for years. But despite his proximity to the quiet singer, Micah finds it difficult to both crack through the walls Bellamy has erected around himself and also reach beyond his own trauma of losing his best friend.
Micah wants to be more than friends with Bellamy, and while the guitarist seems to want that as well, Bellamy struggles with anxiety that is crippling to his creative self and prevents him from allowing anyone to get close to him. Between Micah struggling to let go of his dead best friend’s memory, and Bellamy refusing to do anything to get a grip on his crushing anxiety, the two men seemed destined to never become more than friends despite their desire for a different outcome.
Escaping Indigo was a real study in how a person who suffers with depression and crippling anxiety can shut themselves off from the world. Both Micah and Bellamy struggled with some real personal darkness, and desperately wanted to get beyond it, but had not a clue as to how to maneuver. Micah simply could not turn off the intense sadness that thrummed through to his very core when he remembered losing his best friend. Not only was he dealing with Eric’s death but the fact that since then, Micah himself had discovered that playing in a band no longer holds any real joy for him. He is, in a word, adrift. Eric’s brother convinces Micah to be a roadie with him for a few months, and it is here that Micah feels his first spark of life in the form of the lead singer, Bellamy. He has both a sense of attraction and some definite hero worship for Bellamy, and it takes Micah some time to come to terms with the fact that Bellamy is just a normal guy and one that Micah is worthy of being with intimately.
But Bellamy is struggling with demons of his own, and he is not just reluctant to confront them but loathe to do so. He refuses to get any help with the dark depression he suffers as a result of his anxiety, and here is where the story really excels. You see the way in which the author, Eli Lang, wrote about both these men and their struggles as very realistic. There were no easy answers for these guys and, in the end, they had to decide to either say goodbye to their fledgling mutual attraction, or make definite moves towards getting help.
Thematically this was a strong novel, and I felt it dealt with these sobering themes quite well. Unfortunately, it was just a bit too long in the tooth. After a few chapters of Micah struggling to feel worthy and find his purpose in life, I was ready for the confrontation to occur between him and Bellamy—but it didn’t. Instead, this line of self-questioning labored on and on, leading to a pacing issue that was, at best, substantially slowed. To be frank, by midway in the novel I wanted someone to move on—either Bellamy or Micah—and I really needed something to happen as my attention began to waiver.
I understood that the author was striving for an in depth look at how these two men struggled with their respective problems, but I felt that some serious editing needed to happen in this story to keep it from getting weighed down in its own dark themes. Escaping Indigo is a good story that could have been better if the author had allowed for less introspective analyzing and more dialoguing between the main characters.
You can buy Escaping Indigo here:
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