A caper novel for fans of country music legend Rogers.
The country star extends his brand by collaborating on a book that shows how to hold ’em and know when to fold 'em.
Someone who loves country music from the 1970s and '80s, Texas Hold 'em and Texas in general could probably guess what’s in this novel before reading it. Credited to Rogers (Luck or Something Like It, 2012) and regional novelist Blakely (Come Sundown, 2006, etc.), the plot involves a country singer who shares some biographical particulars with Rogers (earlier rock success before a big country breakthrough, Houston-area roots, an insider’s knowledge of Nashville and the music business, and a big hit about gambling) and puts him in the middle of all sorts of complications that involve gambling, a scheme to con a con man, a television pilot, an international betting ring, the FBI and CIA, a heart transplant, a loving mama and romantic intrigue with a beautiful woman who becomes his manager. How beautiful? “You’re drop-dead gorgeous, Dorothy! The cameras would feast on you like a lion on a Watusi!” And “you make Sophia Loren look like a second runner-up in a plain Jane pageant.” And “Brigitte Bardot would kill Raquel Welch for your looks.” Yet the plotting manages to withstand all the chicken-fried clichés, as the stakes continue to escalate beyond anything the reader and most of the characters had anticipated. As the protagonist prepares to launch his country career by appearing as featured entertainment on a televised poker tournament that hopscotches across Texas, the gambling pits seasoned professionals and ringers against amateurs who “looked as if they couldn’t tell an ace in the hole from a hole in the ground.” After a stop in San Antonio includes the obligatory visit to the Alamo (“That there is hallowed ground”), the novel reaches its climax with perhaps the wildest night ever experienced at Gilley’s, once the ultimate Texas honky-tonk. It’s pretty easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys and to guess who will win.
A caper novel for fans of country music legend Rogers.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7653-2385-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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