by Eliza Knight
First published 2026
Eleanor Bell receives an early Alzheimer's diagnosis on the eve of her sixty-ninth birthday. The widow has spent decades sacrificing her singing dreams for family. Now she decides to chase those abandoned aspirations across America's 1969 music festival circuit. She leaves Atlanta without telling anyone her plans. Her daughter Leanne discovers Eleanor missing and recruits her college-bound daughter Nora to help track down grandma. Nora would rather prepare for Yale than take this road trip. Then she hears Eleanor's voice on the radio. Johnny Carson has nicknamed her grandmother the Dame of Rock n' Roll. Leanne and Nora follow Eleanor's trail from California to Denver to Seattle to New York to New Orleans in a Lincoln Continental. They stay one step behind as Eleanor lives her musical dreams. The chase becomes a journey about seizing second chances and celebrating life's encores before the final curtain falls.
Genres: american-fiction, contemporary, adult-fiction, 21st-century
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, second-chance
Setting: Atlanta, California, Denver, New Orleans, New York, Seattle
Period: 1969
320 pages · Paperback · Sourcebooks Landmark
Content warnings: mental-illness