Publication Date: April 18, 2025
It is the summer of 1992. Clara Jane is an alternative music-loving graduate from a broadcast school in Detroit. She lands her first job at a small market radio station in northern Michigan in a one-stoplight town called Saturn. The hyper-local programming (featuring lost farm animal reports and radio obits) and the station’s mix of light hits and great oldies are a far cry from the rock star glamour she hoped to achieve with a radio career.
But Clara finds a home with an eccentric cast of characters, especially the recently-divorced morning man Seth Jones. As Clara and Seth bond over their shared sense of humor and a mutual love of different genres of music, the station is sold and staff members start to be replaced by automation. Will Clara find the radio stardom she craves before the station goes completely robotic?
Radio is often thought to be a bit of a mystery. You can’t see the DJ, and music seems to magically fill the air at the tap of a button. Author and past radio DJ Laura Lee pulls back the proverbial curtain for a behind-the-scenes story in Saturn’s Favorite Music.
Clara has just graduated from Harrison School of Broadcasting and enjoyed her internship at a trendy modern rock station. This is the type of station she pictures herself being part of, but she knows she needs to start somewhere. Lower Michigan, in the small town of Saturn, held the only opportunity at that time. When she is offered the job to be on the air, she knows she should count her blessings as none of her classmates from Harrison got jobs “on air.”
Lee’s characterization of Clara is spot on, allowing her to develop through the hardships of setting out on one’s own, including collecting makeshift furniture, setting up basic services, and the jarring realization that confidence will take a back seat while fitting into a new workplace. Her new radio home is WRTV, which is the setting filled with the station’s family of employees. As Clara stumbles through her first broadcasts, most of her coworkers offer support, but some appear to root for her to fail. All characters are written with warmth and humor and play a significant role.
Maybe the reader has to be of “a certain age” to read this one as quickly as I did. Each time the light rock song was announced, I was singing in my mind! The story opens in 1992, and one of the conflicts is how the employees react to the change from analog to automated operations at the station. The energetic pace of each broadcast illustrates the physical and mental skills DJs possessed at that time to orchestrate each show before automation became widespread.
Saturn’s Favorite Music is a walk back in time to the era of radio when DJs shaped the music scene. The small town of Saturn and its radio station, WRTV, is the setting of this heartwarming relationship fiction. 
Laura Lee is the author of more than 20 books including biography, humorous reference, fiction, and children’s literature. The Metro Detroit native brings a unique background to her work. She holds a degree in theater and worked as a professional mime, improvisational comic, and radio announcer before becoming a full time writer. She now divides her time between writing and producing (and traveling on) ballet master class tours with her partner the artistic director of the Russian Ballet Foundation.
The San Francisco Chronicle has said of her work, “Lee’s dry, humorous tone makes her a charming companion… She has a penchant for wordplay that is irresistible.”
