A highly readable and occasionally nostalgia-inducing novel about moving on from high school—or not.
An ex–rock star returns to teach English at his Alabama high school in this YA novel from Gibbs, the author of Two Like Me And You (2019).
After his father runs off with his secretary, Marcus Brinks moves with his mother from Texas back to her hometown in Alabama, forcing him to complete his senior year at Rome High School. There, in homeroom, he meets fellow Weezer-enthusiast Jackson Crowder. Marcus thinks he’s found a friend—and maybe even a band mate—in a high school that really cares only about football. Cut to 23 years later. It’s Marcus’ first day again at Rome High School, but now he’s an English teacher. In the intervening years he was the singer/songwriter of the indie rock band Dear Brutus, whose first record sold a half million copies (though, as he’s quick to tell his students, he never made any money off of them). His old homeroom teacher is still at Rome High, as is his former friend Jackson Crowder—though Jackson is now the celebrated coach of the school’s football team. Just what happened in the decades between Marcus’ first day at RHS and his return to the school? And will Marcus make the same mistakes as the last time he walked these halls? As his story unfolds over two separate timelines, Marcus learns that some things about high school really are forever. Gibbs’ prose is smooth with just a bit of 1990s bite. He makes excellent use of his premise, which allows Marcus to opine on the things he hated—and still hates—about school. “This stuff, this is the stuff that matters,” he tells his football-obsessed students. “Algebra matters. Chemistry matters. Drop the winning touchdown pass tonight, and ten years from now, no one will care, and if they do still care, they’re losers, so why do you care what they think anyway? But drop the ball in here and you’re screwed.” There are some odd touches—the teachers all have literal Roman names like Nero and Trajan—but the novel is decidedly engrossing due to its quirky characters and its deft portrayal of two different eras of teen culture.
A highly readable and occasionally nostalgia-inducing novel about moving on from high school—or not.Pub Date: March 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9857165-6-1
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Borne Back Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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