Editorial review
Song of Seasons
By Michael Otis
In Song of Seasons, Michael Otis delivers a vulnerable love story tangled in the chaos of fame, steadied with faith and therapy, and interrupted by a deal with the devil who prefers to go by “Lucy.” Yes, you read that ri...
Reviewed by CANREADS
In Song of Seasons, Michael Otis delivers a vulnerable love story tangled in the chaos of fame, steadied with faith and therapy, and interrupted by a deal with the devil who prefers to go by “Lucy.” Yes, you read that right. At its centre is Mitchell Merrick: athlete-turned-rock-star, bipolar and devout, hopeful and self-hating in equal measure. Mitchell is a contradiction you recognize instantly—complicated, conflicted, and unmistakably real.
Following Mitchell from painfully awkward adolescence through the vertigo of overnight success and into the isolating quiet of addiction and self-loathing, Otis writes with such raw closeness that you can’t help but feel intrusive, as if you’ve stumbled upon a private journal. Small, precise details carry enormous weight: Mitchell’s trembling hand hovering over a Lamborghini door, Summer pushing a single piece of lettuce across her plate at Heaven’s Gates, the scratch of a pen against paper in a London hotel room at 3:00 a.m. These moments give the narrative its pulse, grounding a larger story about celebrity and collapse in tactile, human vulnerability. This is a character study where the spectacle of fame matters less than the cost of carrying it.
The book’s ambition is genuinely fresh. Therapy transcripts, text threads, song lyrics, and devil’s-bargain sequences layer together in a collage that risks fragmentation but frequently coheres in striking ways. The supernatural wager with “Lucy” is a risk that pays off thematically, literalizing Mitchell’s war with himself while winking at rock‑and‑roll mythmaking.
The novel occasionally stalls in extended metaphors and philosophical reflection, softening the story’s forward momentum. As a result, a few passages feel more contemplative than necessary. Still, those digressions deepen Mitchell’s interior world, and the final act restores urgency as therapy sessions, repaired friendships, and the culminating final poem guide Mitchell toward a fragile, hard-won peace. It is a love story that bruises before it blesses.
Raw, risky, and real, Song of Seasons lingers because it embraces contradiction: devotion and doubt, celebrity and collapse, grace and self-sabotage. For anyone who has ever loved the wrong person too long, grieved deeply, or tried to rebuild themselves from broken pieces, this novel meets them in that in-between space and stays there long after the story ends.
—CANREADS BOOK REVIEW