Reviews of The Future Saints make comparisons to other great fictional love stories in rock and roll, like Almost Famous or Daisy Jones and the Six, and those comparisons are not wrong. The Future Saints is a novel that shows the wild side of being in a rock band having a meteoric rise to fame and the dark side of that same rise, while also dealing with themes of grief, love, and friendship.
The book opens on band The Future Saints, who, despite years of moderate success, are at such a low point in their career that their record label wants to drop them—but not without squeezing one more album out of them. The label sends Theo to get the band on track enough to record and then cut them loose. What he finds is a trio of bandmates led by singer and de facto band leader Hannah, who seems to have gone off the deep end: drinking and slurring on stage (sometimes even falling off it), doing drugs and partying, and generally exuding a DGAF attitude to everyone and everything, including her own band.
Hannah’s newly self-destructive behavior and dark lyrics are the result of her sister’s recent death, and while it’s not her intention, these new dark songs she’s writing, and her on-stage and after-hours antics, seem to resonate with fans and make her go viral, prompting the label to send The Future Saints back on tour, with Theo along for the ride.
While the book may be billed as a romance novel, and there is romance in it, it feels more like a ride on the roller coaster of rock and roll that also has some romance woven through. Hannah and Theo are clearly the main characters of the book, with chapters switching between their perspectives, but other characters, like Future Saints members Kenny and Ripper and even the ghost of Hannah’s sister, play significant roles in helping create a book with such depth that in just 350 pages, you feel attached to all of its characters.
