REVIEW: Arrangements in Blue
- Alice Rickless
- Apr 8, 2024
- 3 min read
A short review of Arrangements in Blue by Amy Key.
I found Arrangements in Blue because of Dolly Alderton. While scrolling through instagram, I saw that Dolly was doing an event in which she would be interviewing poet Amy Key about her new book. I find Dolly to be one of the most honest authors about being a woman and the beauty and the struggles intrinsic to feminine identity. When I saw her recommending Key’s book, a book about her experience with Joni Mitchell’s album Blue, I knew at once I had to read it.
Arrangements in Blue is not a long book. In around 200 pages, Key uses the album Blue to explain and inform her life experiences. She takes us from her time growing up in England in the 80s and 90s, desperately desiring the elusive romantic love, the stable love, the passionate love she sees around her, to the 2020s when she is in her forties having never found this love, and figuring out what her life can be without it. It is a book about being selfish and unapologetic, but also about fear, societal expectations, and overwhelming desire. It is honest, and true, and spectacular.
Many authors attempt to use music as a way to express feelings, but Key does it in one of the best ways I’ve ever read. At times some authors can come across as having almost parasocial relationships with the musicians they idolize, and it can be quite hard to not do this. Key manages to maintain that separation, acknowledging in her writing that she does not know Joni, but she feels her. Instead of taking Joni’s lyrics and words at face value, Key relates them to her own life, her own feelings, her own interpretation.
It is evident that Key was a poet first. Her prose reads almost like poetry. Not in the rhythm or traditional intonations of poetry, but in the way poetry can glide easily along and almost sing to you when it is done really well. The way she writes is almost musical, connecting her to Joni in a way I’m not sure she even intended.
My only critique, and it is not a large critique, is that the focus at the end of the book changed from her to her friend Roddy. The book is so open most of the way through about being able to want, to be selfish, to feel guilt and pain, to feel all of her own feelings and be open about it. I felt almost disappointed for her that the end of the book was almost not her own. It was almost as though she couldn’t fully embrace her own philosophy, that she felt the guilt of talking about herself too much and the need to put someone’s story above her own at the most important part of a book, the ending. This may be just my own interpretation of it, and some might disagree with me (if you’ve read it I’d love to hear your opinion), but it is simply how I felt when I read it.
This book made me think of the record of Blue that I have sitting on the shelf at home. I bought it at a flea market in the outskirts of Paris with my last bits of cash to bring home to my flatmate as a gift when we moved into our flat together in London. The beginnings of our adult life. This record of Blue has seen long nights at dinner parties with our closest friends ending with many empty bottles of wine and loosened tongues, days spent working from home trying to break up the mundanity of online meetings with music, and time spent in our home just getting ready for the next event, night out, date, or other adventure.Music from my flatmate’s granddad’s hand-me-down record player has led the soundtrack to our early twenties, and will lead us on for the rest of our lives.
While a difficult read at times, potentially because of the relatability of it, even for a young woman, it was a read that was absolutely worth it. Worth the public crying in the half empty members’ room as I hit the chapter on the difficulty and near pressure of self-love. If you see a copy, I’d recommend you pick it up at once.
4.5 stars
Support your local bookshop and go in and buy it there if you can!
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