Wreck Your Heart: A Review

Author: Lori Rader-Day
Publication Date: January 6, 2026
Publisher: Minotaur Books

by Donald G. Evans

There are many variations of “country music,” just as there are many different kinds of “Chicago.” We learn this from Dahlia “Doll” Devine, a 26-year-old self-invented front woman eking out a modest place in the (“tight”) local music scene and in her Jefferson Park neighborhood. On and off stage, Doll plays to the crowd: a big, flamboyant shit kicker wired to get people dancing and singing and flirting and fighting. But Doll’s lack of emotional maturity leads to perpetual detachment from even the closest people in her life, a contradiction to the raw urgency found in her favorite country songs.

Lori Rader-Day’s eighth novel, Wreck My Heart, journeys through Chicago streets and a curated country music playlist to find the ways and means a person develops enough self-worth, trust, and empathy to allow intimacy into her life.

Dahlia Devine speaks directly to her reader (“I’ll tell you who Alex is later.”), breaking a kind of narrative fourth wall. Her voice—filled with smart-ass humor tinged with a uniquely Chicago brand of skepticism, sarcasm, and frankness—guides us through an existential moment that begins, roughly, at the bottom. Or maybe not. It’s through this narrative voice and the artifice of knowing us readers, and vice versa, that Doll experiments in honesty, trust, and genuine bonding. She possesses a keen ability to self-assess, with no life skills or confidence to enact change.

Doll’s come through a rough childhood. The product of an addict mother and a who-knows? father, Doll bounced through the state child welfare system until it, like her parents, waved good-bye. Alex McPhee is the only force of stability in her life—he, a recovering alcoholic bar owner. Alex played a father-ish role to Doll just before and during her foster care years (he alone attended her high school graduation), and then offered her support, including a home when needed, as she aged out. “Guardian,” the paperwork says, but not really.

Doll is her own invention—the name as well as the Southern drawl, mannerisms and dress, belie her down-class Chicago roots. It works on stage. Doll, with an affinity for classics like Patsy Cline, performs with her band every Wednesday night at Alex’s McPhee’s Tavern. The stage was literally built just for her. Doll also tends bar, sweeps the floor, opens and closes, mans the till, and generally serves as an unofficial partner in the bar’s operation. Her Wednesday audiences have grown over the years, both in numbers and in devotion. She thrives in the spotlight.

McPhee’s, though Doll resists this notion, is the only place in her life resembling home. Set against a frigid Chicago winter and a gentrifying (read: soon to price out all the current residents) neighborhood, McPhee’s, replete with roaring fireplace, represents a kind of warmth in Doll’s life. She says, “Ahead of me, the warm glow of McPhee’s. I was still backtracking through the featureless wind tunnel this stretch of Milwaukee Avenue had become, condos, more condos, and high-end storefronts, dollar signs in everyone’s eyes. All the corner stores, taquerias, or Polish bakeries had sold up, all the stuff that made Chicago great, that made neighborhoods like ours livable.”

Doll is broke, or worse, if you count the credit card debit. Then: her boyfriend Joey apparently boogies on her and their rent balance. She’s “still the sort of person who could be kneecapped by something so small…” She’s locked out of her apartment—permanently—so it’s back to McPhee’s, where there is a standing offer for her to share an upstairs room. In the hassle that accompanies Doll’s eviction—like losing her phone charger and moving her remaining stuff, garbage bag style, to the bar—she also gets fired from her part-time music store job. “I wore other people’s clothes and lived in other people’s homes and sang other people’s songs,” she narrates. “I put on other people’s lives. It was easier than living my own.”

Marisa, Doll’s mother, shows up at the bar—her first such appearance in twenty years. Confused, angry, baffled, Doll does what she does best, namely to push her long-lost mother away. Right after, Doll discovers a dead body in the alleyway outside the bar—it’s Joey. Then a half-sister she never knew she had charges into her life to report that their mother is AWOL. (Well, it takes a second for Doll to figure out their relationship, which, out of habit, she refutes or anyway distains).

And just like that, we have two mysteries (Marisa’s disappearance, we soon suspect, might be the result of foul play). Three, if you count the strange noises coming from the vacant half of the bar building, along with unhinged doors and shadowy movements. (Tied to the rumored Al Capone treasure hidden in the depths of the building? We’re not sure). Plus, plus, on the same night Marisa crashes a show night, a talent manager expresses interest in Doll, on the condition that she scrap some of the old-timely cover songs and write an original tune. A Christmas Eve date is set as a kind of audition, in which Bern, if he likes what he hears, might use his considerable influence to elevate Doll’s career. Or at least give her one.

These series of dramatic events, and the fact that Doll and Alex are obvious murder suspects (who knows?, Alex might even be guilty), propel action. It is a time of deep inner reflection for Doll, as she processes revelations like A. Doll’s mother is now sustaining a somewhat bourgeois, suburban existence, B. Sicily (the half-sister) is rather likeable, and C. an evil friend of Marisa’s made a crazy, stupid-high offer on the bar.

Deadlines are set. Doll’s life, precarious though it may be, is maybe about to get a whole lot more desperate. There’s little choice but for Doll to confront her past, present, and future. If Doll can figure out who she is, then maybe she can figure out who she is to others and others to her. “God, it was a racket, feelings,” Doll tells. “Having to care for people, to put so much effort and concern out into the world without any of it necessarily coming back to you. Knowing, actually, that it had never come your way and if it did, you weren’t equipped to accept it.” And maybe she can finally overcome her writer’s block to finish a song.

As the novel progresses, this metaphorical life-and-death struggle becomes literal. Saving her mother, saving her band and bandmates, saving the bar, saving Alex, saving her sister, saving herself, saving the attractive bar regular, saving herself…Doll’s going to need a whole lot of trust, a whole lot of cooperation, and a whole lot of sacrifice. Ultimately, Doll looks her life in the eye and realizes that, in fact, a lot of what she desires is right there already.

Wreck Your Heart is a funny novel—at times, really funny. Lori uses the Chicago weather as a veritable character and does a better job depicting it than most anybody I’ve read. “A summer day was a myth, here on this street, but I was hungry for the hope that winter would eventually—eventually—come to an end, and this would all be some kind of misunderstanding…” The author also expertly, and in defiance of stereotypes, articulates country music as an art form and a viable genre, even in Chicago. “But country wasn’t a place. It wasn’t one kind of music, either, or one kind of singer. Country was that gong—loud, hollow, ringing on and on unanswered.”

Lori also gets us to ground level in depicting Chicago as a place of distinction and character. She refuses to fall back on standard truisms or lazy scene building, but rather uses the micro to elevate our sense of the macro. “Here’s the thing about the city of Chicago. It’s diced up in a hundred ways. There were divisions you lived by, parishes if you were Catholic, wards for who to blame for the trash not getting picked up. North Side, South Side; that was baseball. There were divisions made by nature, too—the Y of the Chicago River, the hard stop of the lake at the east. We had official names for places, but neighborhoods were both more and less than their boundary lines—neighborhood was your pride, your protectorate, the flag you flew high.”

Wreck Your Heart is a decent-enough whodunnit, but to think of it like that is to miss the novel’s larger appeal. This is a fun, interesting, extremely well-crafted story that uses plot to map out the pathway through an aloof exterior to a raw, country music-like interior. The many interesting storylines converge into a reckoning. We want Doll, who’s seduced us through her narrative voice, to come out of this not only alive but well. Like Doll, this book is highly entertaining, but there’s a whole lot more to her, once you put in the work to get there.

Donald G. Evans is the author of a novel and story collection, as well as the editor of two anthologies of Chicago literature, most recently Wherever I’m At: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry. He is the Founding Executive Director of the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.