Unless you were interested in playing the wicked step-groupies in Cinderella videos, there wasn’t a lot of room for a pair of young women in the heavy-metal scene of the ’80s. Certainly not as musicians in their own right. That’s the daunting landscape that confronts Sapphire and Destiny, the heroines of author Dawn LeFevre’s keenly observed and lovingly rendered period novel The Metal Sisters — showcasing today on Tinnitist.
Inspired by LeFevre’s passion for headbanging music, the book is set in 1985, when burning riffs were everywhere and the allure of dominating the Sunset Strip was overwhelming. Into that maelstrom wade a college-bound honour student and a tequila-soaked bad girl who are united by their love of playing guitar. Can their band climb the mountain of metal to a height that justifies putting their life plans on indefinite hold? Or will poverty, unreliable bandmates, and a palpable lack of label interest make it all go up in smoke?
The Metal Sisters has been a long time coming. Growing up in New Jersey, LeFevre was the typical horse-crazy girl, except that her barn radio blasted metal, not country music. When she wasn’t horsing around, LeFevre was locked in her room playing guitar along to her ever-expanding album collection. During her undergrad years, she realized that her skill set was better suited to scribbling than shredding. A lateral move into reviewing albums and writing features proved a natural fit, and she even managed to get some short stories about lady shredders into print. Surely a novel on the subject was the next logical step?
Instead, after graduating with a degree in animal science, LeFevre spent the next 13 years training and racing thoroughbred horses. She intended to finish The Metal Sisters one day, but the needs of her equine charges superseded her writing dreams. Once she was finally able to pick up her pen again, she was driven to write about the things she loved, and the fruit was her first novel Backstretch Girls, which won the Best Horse Racing Fiction award at the 2021 Equus Film & Arts Festival. Her second novel Racetrack Rogues was a finalist for the 2021 Dr. Tony Ryan Book Award. She also published an equestrian-oriented novella and contributed to a horse-racing website. In a further show of versatility, she even became a wine blogger.
Yet the liberating sound of classic metal had never fully left her internal soundtrack. So enduring was her devotion that she had full-on married her guitar teacher. And in the decades since she had mothballed The Metal Sisters, female guitarists had somehow become all the rage. From A-circuit axe goddesses like Nita Strauss to the legion of lipstick-and-leather virtuosos regularly displaying their chops on YouTube and TikTok, the clicking of blood-red fingernails on a fretboard was suddenly everywhere. Yet when it came to heavy metal fiction, the shelves were practically bare. The time for LeFevre to revisit the tale of Sapphire and Destiny was clearly nigh.
“I began to feel that creative hunger to finish the story that had remained close to my heart even after all these years,” she says. “And so, I did. I wrote The Metal Sisters not only for this generation of social-media shredders, but also for those few, brave women guitarists who kicked down the walls back in the ’80s so they could step through.”
These days, LeFevre is kicking down walls of her own. Even before its release, her new novel had risen to No. 3 on the Amazon music-books chart and No. 1 in the metal ranking. Striking while the iron is hot, she’ll be appearing at the Collingswood Book Festival on Saturday, Oct. 5, in Collingswood, N.J. She’ll be signing copies of her books — and while she isn’t promising to sign your guitar, it’s a good bet the idea would make her smile.
Join Dawn LeFevre & The Metal Sisters on her website, Facebook and Instagram.
