Paint Our Song by Maia Kinley Review

Paint Our Song by Maia Kinley | My Rating: 5/5 | Amazon | Goodreads | Bookbub

Blurb

Miles Curtis, a painter, owes his success to the popular band Cloverlily. Their music helped him get out of a slump many years ago, and he’s been a huge fan ever since. When he temporarily moves back home to help his family’s inn, he finds out that their guitarist, Calvin Lowe, is staying in one of their rooms.

Calvin, who turns out to be very quiet and withdrawn, is currently dealing with his band’s break-up. He makes it clear from the onset that he’s here to keep to himself. When he finds out that Miles is the painter he’s been wanting to meet, he seems more annoyed than anything else.
The two of them clash from the onset, but it doesn’t take that long for both of them to figure out that they have more in common than they initially thought–including being fans of each other’s work for years.

Paint Our Song is an m/m romance for those who love slow burns, opposites attract, strangers-to-lovers, and small-town novels.

Kindle Edition
Expected publication October 22, 2024

Premise and Overall Takeaways from Paint Our Song

The premise of this slice-of-life, chill-vibe love story in Paint Our Song is cute and low-angst, even with one character still grieving the loss of a parent. The setup is cute, Miles has loved the band Cloverlily forever and follows their career as a huge fan. Calvin, the other love interest, is the band’s guitarist, who also seemingly has followed Miles’ career for years. Miles’s paintings have even inspired songs that he’s listened to. What an interesting cycle, right? Songs that helped Miles get through tough times were actually inspired by a painting the songwriter had seen and admired. It is a nice touch to the story that makes their eventual pairing seem cosmic in a way, fated.

The setup of Paint Our Song is fairly straightforward. Miles moves back from “the City” (more on that later) so he can save the family inn. He arrives to help his mother and the hotel which is in dire straights. But he knows next to nothing about business, something that might have helped. His father wanted Miles to be happy and pursue his dreams as an artist, so he went to art school. But maybe a business course would have helped, even if he’d taken it as an elective. Because it’s a lot to jump into! Especially because he and his pal Gabby seem to be the only ones who want to save it.

The Hotel

His mother is clearly not all in on running the family’s hotel. I questioned how the inn hadn’t already closed. It’s been five years since Mile’s father passed. The mother doesn’t seem fully invested in the inn’s survival. She wants to travel, to garden, and to live her life. I don’t blame her, she has been grieving too.

However, one would think that avoiding going further into debt would be required if she wants to do the things that will make her happy. Keeping the hotel afloat should be more of a priority for her. But she lets the management of the inn fall by the wayside and hires part-timers. She relies much too heavily on Gabby, an employee who deserves the manager title, but doesn’t get it until she makes motions to leave for greener pastures.

Part-Time Problem

Hiring part-time workers, by the way, is an expensive stop-gap to a failing business. My parents ran a family business while I was growing up, so I have some personal experience with how things usually work. Most importantly, I know that when finances are tight family businesses generally don’t hire help from outside the family. Instead, they take on more work themselves.

If the mounting debt and pending closure of her hotel, which is her family’s legacy, were more of a priority, the mother character would be doing most of the work herself. But she’s not. She focuses instead on puttering around in her garden. She’s truly not invested in the hotel’s survival. It seems like she is almost waiting for the hotel to completely flounder so she can have a clear out.

I found this element of the mother’s characterization disappointing. It might be due to her overall character being underdeveloped. In fact, as I write this review I can’t recall the mother’s name. All I know is that the hotel is called Hannah’s Inn and that’s NOT the mother’s name.

Saving the Hotel

I realize I’ve deviated from the original intent of my review because I honed in on the business stuff. But that’s okay, I liked the parts of Paint Our Song surrounding Miles, Gabby, and their newly hired digital marketing manager’s efforts to save the hotel. I do have a BBA (that I don’t use in my real-life job) so I like stories that delve into this area and do it well. The author did a great job here of making the business plans exciting. She avoids getting too bogged down by details. And the social media marketing plan is a good call. I liked that they didn’t let a near-disastrous event harm their reputation. Instead, they flipped the script and seized their viral moment. Way to go!

Chill and Peaceful Vibe / Sweet Characters

The plot of Paint Our Song is mostly chill and peaceful. It is a quick read. I like the vibe of the city the hotel is in, and none of the characters are black-and-white evil. I hate when stories feature characters who are one-sided, shallow villains. And the villain, if this story has one, was a character I still want the best for, even if they were annoying at times and came in between Calvin and Miles smoothly getting together. The story was light. I enjoyed that nothing huge happens, even when things are stressful for the characters, the drama wasn’t life-altering.

Miles and Calvin

Miles is an enthusiastic labrador of a person and Calvin is a prickly grump. Sunshine/Grump is one of my favorite tropes and I enjoyed Miles and Calvin as characters in Paint Our Song. Miles is earnest, sweet, and awkward. I immediately wanted him to succeed in all his endeavors, first page, first paragraph. I love him. Especially, I like the progression his character takes.

Calvin is harder to get a read on, but I found his prickliness is more due to him being shy than actually grumpy or mean-spirited. I ended up loving Calvin a lot and wished that we got some paragraphs from his POV too so we could know what was going on beneath the surface. There are times in the story when Calvin frowns or makes a face but his emotions aren’t ever explained. I wanted more insight into what he was thinking. I also got the idea that he crushed on Miles even before he met him. But unfortunately, that was never completely confirmed in the story. I feel like Calvin has a lot of depth that isn’t able to be explored in a single POV story.

Nitpicks

This story only has minimal issues. It’s an adorable story and I’ve already discussed my major sticking points I encountered while reading, namely the mother’s motivation or lack there of. But no review I post would be complete without the parts my immersion got snagged on and drew me out of the story.

The City? Setting Questions

The setting in this story was vague enough to make me question if Miles lived in New York City or another city. I think it would be helpful to name a bigger city even if it’s a fictional place. I dislike vagueness in a story. Miles lived in “the City” which to me means New York City. My assumptions were furthered because the descriptions of his hometown seemed vaguely upstate New York or Massachusetts-like. But then Miles talks about driving in the city just a few blocks to find parking and if one has to walk only a few blocks in Manhattan they definitely don’t take the time to get in their car, lose their current parking space only to drive a few blocks to find more, expensive parking.

None of the descriptions of the bigger city make it seem big enough to be Manhattan. Maybe Boston? But Boston is big too and driving there is even more of a headache.

In short, I think it’s fine to have a story take place in a real setting just as much as it’s okay to take place in a fictional setting. But it takes away from the story when something isn’t specifically named so I have to put together a picture of the background myself.

Pacing and Editing

The pacing of the story is slow at times, maybe it needs a deep edit to eliminate some unneeded scenes. It just seemed to plod along in the middle and I wanted the story to climax and have a happy ending. At 34 chapters, and in my Kindle 5000+ locations, it’s a lengthy novel. I can’t say for certain how many pages it would be in a print edition because the location in an ebook refers to a stable location for text that is the same for various screens and monitor sizes, so there’s no good way to correlate locations to page numbers. But I can estimate that it’s a long book.

Odd Apostrophes and Turns of Phrase

There were a few odd phrases in Paint Our Song that made me pause so I could parse what the author was trying to convey. I got really snagged up on the adverb ‘frustratingly’ being used in one part in particular.

In the scene, Miles is drawing and the paragraph reads,

“This time, the papers aren’t crumpled and he hasn’t frustratingly run harsh pencil marks over his drafts”.

Adverb Placement

It took a few re-reads of this sentence before I understood that the author is not saying that it was frustrating that Miles had marked up his paper. Instead, they mean that Miles had, in the past, scratched out his drafts in frustration.

Those are two different things, and I think my confusion came down to adverb placement. This is NOT me being a prescriptive grammarist because I am not, but in English adverb placement can shift meanings in a subtle way that I feel made this part confusing. Let me put on a language teacher hat for a minute.

In English, adverbs can go pretty much anywhere in a sentence and the sentence works. However, the nuance in a sentence can change with various placements. In the example above, the adverb is placed right after the auxiliary verb ‘hasn’t’ and before the past participle ‘run’, conveying the idea that it was a generally frustrating thing that Miles had done when he scratched up his paper.

Suggestion

Maybe, instead of frustrating being used in an adverbial tense ‘frustratingly’, the author might instead use the term ‘frustration’. I think this would eliminate the confusion and it would be clearer. For example, they might say “he hasn’t run harsh pencil marks over his drafts in frustration”. That is clearer. IS THIS JUST ME? This is the teacher in me coming out to play and it might be overstepping boundaries but I did get snagged on this and it pulled me out of the story to mull over what I would do to enhance clarity.

Confusing Contractions

There are also a few places where a contraction is used instead of writing out the full phrase. It seems like a small nitpick but it messed with the flow and made me pause, as a reader. Like,

“He’d much [rather] retreat to his house…”

He’d could be either He would or he had in this example, and the missing word made it more confusing. The ‘rather’ does need to be edited in, but there will still be two possible meanings for he’d there. I think because there’s these two possibilities it sounds weird as “he’d” and would flow better to read “he would much rather go back to his house”.

Another example:

“Megan’s a force to be reckoned with.”

I think it would read better to say Megan is a force…” I had to read this sentence twice since ‘Megan’s’ could mean two things. It could either show ownership, which would not be correct here, or it could mean ‘Megan is’, I had to pause and make sure I was reading it correctly.

There are a few other places but I forgot to highlight them so I can’t remember specifics.

This is the nitpick section so these gripes might seem like an overstep or me looking too deeply into things, but to me, if something I read makes me stop reading, take the time to highlight it, and think about possible edits, I feel it’s worth mentioning.

Fanfic Vibes? (Not That There’s Anything Wrong With That)

The pacing and odd phrase here and there, along with one of the main characters being in the music industry, gave Paint Our Song a bit of a fanfic vibe from time to time. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!! Seriously. I write (or have written, it’s been a long time) fanfic, you can find the links in the top menu! There is absolutely nothing wrong with a good fanfic and I am not the one to cast shade on authors wanting to cross over because it’s my dream to do the same thing. So this is 100% not a knock.

But parts of Paint Our Song did seem, at times, like maybe it was first imagined as a fanfiction. What it became is so much more, and a really good story, so I’m wondering if I should even mention this, but this is my personal blog review and I did leave this part off of the Amazon, Goodreads, and Bookbub reviews so I will go ahead and post it.

Recommend or Not? Recommend!

Highly recommend this beautiful story about a grumpy musician and a cheerful artist finding each other after rotating around one another’s spheres for some time. It’s fate, and it’s cute. And I really liked Paint Our Song.

I received a free copy of this book via Booksprout and am voluntarily leaving a review.

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