Review by Jane Ward
“It’s pitch black and Alice won’t stop screaming.” (4)
Two pages into The Fun Times Brigade, author Lindsay Zier-Vogel’s follow-up to her acclaimed novel Letters to Amelia, and I am fully transported to my own early days of mothering an inconsolable, colicky newborn. The sleeplessness, the isolation, the need for a break and the equal but ironically opposite unwillingness to be out of reach of the child. The blur that is one day to the next.
My experience is well in the past. The novel’s main character, new mother Amy, is in the throes of the wailing and sleep deprivation, struggling to both enjoy her daughter and refrain from resenting her husband, Max, a mathematics professor who gets to “sit in his silent office and follow a thought, any thought, to its end.” (6) When Max asks at the end of the day what she’s done and has she managed to leave the house, Amy can only answer “nothing” and “no.” She has taken a leave of absence from her career as a musician and singer with a children’s music trio known as The Fun Times Brigade, with a plan to return to touring as soon as she can. However, her brain feels so depleted she can’t write new music or lyrics and is not ready to go back on the road. Her life, she feels, is and will continue to be a bubble outside of the world she once participated in.
With a clever use of alternating time lines, Zier-Vogel shows us just what that world was. We see the Amy before Max, a solo musician trying to make a name for herself on the children’s entertainment circuit, and the Amy who meets husband and wife Fran and Jim, well-known Canadian folks musicians looking to form a touring trio. This will be her big break, leading to concerts and recording contracts and a children’s television show. Heady times.
However, when she gets a chance to play with a popular indie rock group called BIKES, Amy begins to wonder if making children’s music is not quite as important as playing for adults. She feels lesser as an artist and begins to focus more on jamming with BIKES, flouting the terms of her Brigade contract in the process and harming her relationship with Fran and Jim. Her marriage to Max also suffers. He works constantly while achieving tenure, thus is rarely home before dark. Meanwhile, Amy is rarely home after: “After every BIKES rehearsal, Amy joined the band on a tour of dive bars…they’d finish one pitcher, then another and Sam would hand out shots, and even though there was no room, they’d move the tables and dance.” (85) A disastrous choice made after one of those nights brings everything crashing down around her, leaving Amy to wonder if any of these relationships can be repaired.
From the present timeline, readers know that she has made peace with Fran and Jim, and that she and Max have recommitted to each other and have welcomed Alice. This story arc alone would be satisfying. But what begins in the nursery as an intimate snapshot of this burgeoning family soon deepens, layer by layer, through the stories of Amy before and after Alice. When The Fun Times Brigade plays what will likely be its final concert, Amy contemplates, “The biggest and most significant chapter of her life, done. She has no idea what she’s going to do now.” (347)
We’re left to wonder, as Amy does, if it is possible for her to continue as a mother and a working artist, will one responsibility inevitably win over the other, or is making a full and authentic life simply a series of making choices–sometimes for family, sometimes for art–that continue to move that life forward, however imperfectly? In the end, the answers will be up to each individual, but the questions and the honest discussions of these shed light where there was once isolation and sometimes shame or regret.
The Welsh poet and artist, Nicky Arscott, wrote across her 2014 text-art painting, The Symmetry of Evaporating: “The baby growls instead of cooing like it says in the baby book.” I thought of Arscott’s work as I was reading The Fun Times Brigade. We hear messages, internally and externally, to have the perfect child, be the perfect mother, and have the big, rewarding career. As Amy’s story unfolds and she works through her most complicated feelings about how she might be judged as both a mother and an artist, we see it is more true to accept that meeting all the expectations is impossible. That, instead, a full life is fashioned from the striving and creating, from the screwing up and making amends, and from the deep connections we make along the way.
The Fun Times Brigade by Lindsay Zier-Vogel
Book*hug Press, May 2025
Paperback $20.00
ISBN-13 978-1-77166-941-2
Jane Alessandrini Ward is the author of Should Have Told You Sooner (She Writes Press, 2026), In the Aftermath (She Writes Press, 2021), The Mosaic Artist (2011) and Hunger (Forge, 2001). She has been a contributing writer for an online regional and seasonal food magazine and a blogger and occasional host of cooking videos for an internet recipe resource. Jane lives in Massachusetts. To learn more, visit janeaward.com.