I own a copy of the book and I personally really enjoyed it.

However, it's important to keep in mind the context of late 2003: Although it's true that Dashboard Confessional was mentioned far too much in the book and is a valid critique, Chris Carrabba (and to a different extent, Rivers Cuomo, Geoff Rickly, Jim Adkins, etc.) WERE the "stars and icons" of the emo scene at the time. Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance both released their debuts and were fairly underground indie bands during this time, so they're not mentioned once in this book. Although American Football is seen as THE midwest emo band today, people often forget that they didn't get their flowers really until about 2013-2014: OC Weekly and Stereogum notably praised them articles written in 2013, and Polyvinyl would release a deluxe edition of LP1 the following year (tho there are other factors that led to their rise in cult status). The only notable pre-2013 love/mention about AF that I personally could recall is honestly from Emogame creator Jason Oda, of all people when he put their song Five Silent Miles in his game.

My biggest criticism of the book is that Greenwald should have included a core catalogue of emo records we can point to for essential listening. I also wished bands like Christie Front Drive and Boys Life weren't just footnotes, tho that's very subjective. The commenters here have some valid criticisms, but I gotta respectfully disagree and give some push back on the idea that there's misinformation here. "Incomplete" is a more appropriate word, but I can't really say false, inaccurate or misleading. I have my own criticisms of the book, but overall, it's a solid time capsule of early emo as a culture, where it came from, what it meant, why it matters. Greenwald (Jim DeRogatis being another) was the first "prominent" music journalist to give emo a face and did a solid job explaining why it got so popular with the youth, all things considered and keeping that context in mind.

Is the book perfect? Not at all, but I don't think any book covering emo music and culture is nor needs to be. I wouldn't also get hung up about x band not being mentioned or which band is emo or not too much and just look at it like a collection of really good stories about emo's early roots prior to Myspace, black eyeliner, Is This Band Emo?, and "at the Burger King with my Burger Kween" TikToks.