Perfect Summer Beach Read For Millennials

I remember making mixtapes. When you were a kid growing up when I was a kid, there were two ways to get songs onto your tape: a dual tape deck (covetable, and eventually something my family had, but not until later) or the good old radio. I don’t know how many nights I sat there in my bedroom, waiting for a song to come on so I could add it to my mix. Obviously this made for some haphazard tracklists because things were in the order you could get them off the radio, so I never got much into the mixtape as artform. I am an obsessive playlist curator on my iTunes today, though, which is for all intents and purposes the same thing.

Mixtapes as artform are at the heart of Libby Cudmore’s The Big Rewind. We’re going back to Brooklyn…but this time, the modern-day hipster-infested version. Jett Bennett is subletting her grandmother’s rent-controlled apartment and working temp jobs while she tries to figure out what to do with her life now that she has her Master’s in music journalism but no one seems to want to pay her for her writing. When she gets a mixtape in her mailbox meant for her neighbor KitKat, she goes to drop it off…and discovers KitKat’s body, murdered by a blow to the head. Jett works to try to solve the crime, the only clue to which is the mixtape, and is inspired to go back through her own collection of mixtapes from lost loves, reaching back out to them along the way…

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