Book Review: Somewhere In The Crowd by Katrina Logan

‘Somewhere In The Crowd’ by Katrina Logan was released in April 2023, less than a month before the UK hosted the Eurovision Song Contest on behalf of Ukraine. The novel follows a group of friends who meet twelve years prior in 2010, at the Eurovision Grand Final in Oslo, and make a pact to meet for the contest each year.

The story is chronological and episodic, jumping from person to person, offering glimpses into the lives of these characters as they grow up and find their feet in careers, fall in love, change their minds and make mistakes. It was a fun, easy read.

Due to the book having such a wide scope of time to cover, it wasn’t necessarily easy to bond with the characters. The only one that seemed to have some weight for me as a reader, was the primary protagonist, Millie, who starts the book as a seventeen year old girl, awed by her grandparents’ Eurovision love story, having met at the competition in 1974, locking eyes as ABBA finished performing Waterloo. She romanticises the competition and the colourful people, bright lights and extravagant costumes, and of course, the connections that can be made there. She and her friend, James, attempt to sneak backstage at the Final and run into two other opportunistic hopefuls attempting the same, Noah, an Australian nomad, and Ingrid, a German girl who was determined to not let her boyfriend’s infidelity but her dampener on her weekend.

I enjoyed seeing how the pieces of the characters’ stories fell into place. And it was a feel-good story about forging connections, having a laugh and a sing and a dance. It was littered with musical references and was clearly well-researched, filled with references to the competition and its history throughout.

However, I feel like perhaps in Logan’s desire to wrap the story up with the 2023 competition in Liverpool, she missed out on the opportunity to round it off a bit earlier. If the story had been set prior to 2010, and concluded pre-pandemic, we as the readers wouldn’t need to sit through what I’d argue was a bit of a clunky chunk of info dumping post-pandemic exposition in order to justify the ending, particularly with James’ tangent of the story. But, that is a minor gripe at best!

I truly enjoyed the read, it certainly got me in the spirit of the competition and is an easy book to thumb through in anticipation of the festivities in years to come. It made me want to go off gallivanting at a Eurovision party for a laugh, an arguably excessive amount of drinking and dancing. The spectacle and excitement ebbs through the book, particularly with the way Logan encapsulates the spirit, in the obscenely intricate, often impractical, and immensely sparkly outfits the spectators wore. I was a fan! Especially of the odd ABBA lyrics she dropped in! And, like Eurovision, it’s somewhere to escape to when you’re sick and tired of everything! * badum tiss *