An intriguing, if overlong, story of a fun-loving guy’s quest for understanding.
Whelihan offers a rollicking historical YA novel about a cross-country road trip in 1969.
High school graduate Brian Hamner wants to have a summer adventure before he gets serious about his future. His plan is to travel south from Minnesota across the United States in a leisurely manner, before eventually ending up in Florida where his aunt and uncle live. Brian hopes for more than just a good time, and his chances of this look good when his parents send him off in a new Volkswagen van; he’s hoping to meet people who, like him, struggle with dysgraphia, a learning disorder that affects one’s ability to write. With Steppenwolf blaring on the radio and various things on his mind, including the Vietnam draft, a high school sweetheart, and the possibility of going to college in the fall, he sets off on a road trip that leads him on a series of adventures. From the get-go, this first-person narrative, which includes a series of journal entries, is riddled with misspelled words, similar to what a dysgraphic writer might write. About graduation night, Brian notes that “Our souperintendent is calling out names” and compares the chair on which he’s sitting to “a piece of pliewould.” This style becomes tedious at times, but it’s used in an intriguing way; it becomes less prevalent as Brian learns strategies to live with the disorder, which gives readers a realistic sense of his experience. As a character, Brian feels a bit emotionally flat, but he has a delightful sense of humor, as when he calls troublesome words that sound alike “homophones or homophonies if they aren’t real werds.” The book is somewhat overloaded with dialogue, but a few of the teachers that the protagonist meets on the road—including a sightless hot dog vendor and a talking raven, whom Brian meets while smoking a “doobee” by the river—deliver some important insights. A classic 1960s rock soundtrack keeps things rolling along, and Whelihan kindly includes a list of these tunes for interested readers.
An intriguing, if overlong, story of a fun-loving guy’s quest for understanding.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-66780-553-5
Page Count: 310
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Hokey plot, good fun.
A business executive becomes an unjustly wanted man.
Walter Nash attends his estranged father Tiberius’ funeral, where Ty’s Army buddy, Shock, rips into him for not being the kind of man the Vietnam vet Ty was. Instead, Nash is the successful head of acquisitions for Sybaritic Investments, where he earns a handsome paycheck that supports his wife, Judith, and his teenage daughter, Maggie. An FBI agent approaches Nash after the funeral and asks him to be a mole in his company, because the feds consider chief executive Rhett Temple “a criminal consorting with some very dangerous people.” It’s “a chance to be a hero,” the agent says, while admitting that Nash’s personal and financial risks are immense. Indeed, readers soon find Temple and a cohort standing over a fresh corpse and wondering what to do with it. Temple is not an especially talented executive, and he frets that his hated father, the chairman of the board, will eventually replace him with Nash. (Father-son relationships are not glorified in this tale.) Temple is cartoonishly rotten. He answers to a mysterious woman in Asia, whom he rightly fears. He kills. He beds various women including Judith, whom he tries to turn against Nash. The story’s dramatic turn follows Maggie’s kidnapping, where Nash is wrongly accused. Believing Nash’s innocence, Shock helps him change completely with intense exercise, bulking up and tattooing his body, and learning how to fight and kill. Eventually he looks nothing like the dweeb who’d once taken up tennis instead of football, much to Ty’s undying disgust. Finding the victim and the kidnappers becomes his sole mission. As a child watching his father hunt, Nash could never have killed a living thing. But with his old life over—now he will kill, and he will take any risks necessary. His transformation is implausible, though at least he’s not green like the Incredible Hulk. Loose ends abound by the end as he ignores a plea to “not get on that damn plane,” so a sequel is a necessity.
Hokey plot, good fun.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9781538757987
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.
A love story about a life of second chances.
In Nassau, in the Bahamas, casino detective Vincent LaPorta grills Alfie Logan, who’d come up a winner three times in a row at the roulette table and walked away with $2 million. “How did you do it?” asks the detective. Alfie calmly denies cheating. You wired all the money to a Gianna Rule, LaPorta says. Why? To explain, Alfie produces a composition book with the words “For the Boss, to Be Read Upon My Death” written on the cover. Read this for answers, Alfie suggests, calling it a love story. His mother had passed along to him a strange trait: He can say “Twice!” and go back to a specific time and place to have a do-over. But it only works once for any particular moment, and then he must live with the new consequences. He can only do this for himself and can’t prevent anyone from dying. Alfie regularly uses his power—failing to impress a girl the first time, he finds out more about her, goes back in time, and presto! She likes him. The premise is of course not credible—LaPorta doesn’t buy it either—but it’s intriguing. Most people would probably love to go back and unsay something. The story’s focus is on Alfie’s love for Gianna and whether it’s requited, unrequited, or both. In any case, he’s obsessed with her. He’s a good man, though, an intelligent person with ordinary human failings and a solid moral compass. Albom writes in a warm, easy style that transports the reader to a world of second chances and what-ifs, where spirituality lies close to the surface but never intrudes on the story. Though a cynic will call it sappy, anyone who is sick to their core from the daily news will enjoy this escape from reality.
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780062406682
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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