Love Minus Zero is the story of one woman's journey to find love and happiness. In the midst of a dysfunctional family, equally messed up friends, and her hopeless love for a man destine to break her heart Kate finds herself and discovers that "...you'd better deal with the sh_t in your life before it deals with you." While set against the backdrop of the 1980s punk rock scene in Calgary and the recession, it is a timeless tale of the search for life, love and a sense of identity.

A "bildungsroman" is defined in Dictionary.com as "A novel whose principal subject is the moral, psychological, and intellectual development of a usually youthful main character. " That certainly applies to this book, which describes the journey taken by a young Calgary woman named Kate in the early 1980s as she learns what it is like to hold onto a hopeless love for someone who can never return the affection, both from the standpoint of the lover and of the one who is loved. That's the main subject of this story, but the backdrop of the novel is highly entertaining, because it recounts the experiences of an all-female alternative rock band as they play dangerous gigs in seedy taverns where the Hells Angels sometimes act as the bouncers, and then spend a year getting on each others' nerves while playing a nightly gig at a hotel in, of all places, Tuktoyaktuk, N.W.T. Still, it is the sweet, sad and tender intertwining of two love stories that really makes this novel worth reading, especially for those who grew up in that era.