A pair of pretty musicians, a hesitant attraction that flowers on a concert bus tour, and sophomoric sensibilities trying to...
A young, burned-out musician finds himself drawn to the talented frontman of the band that’s employing him as a roadie.
Grieving a recent loss, Micah is marking time while working for a band he’s always admired in Lang’s (Half, 2017) rocker romance. As he and Bellamy, the band’s singer/songwriter, start a slow-burn love affair, Micah struggles to separate his fan adoration from this relationship, which bears palimpsests of past loves for each of them. His first-person point of view enhances the sense of a groupie crushing on an underground hipster celebrity while staying cool. Meanwhile, Bellamy's rock-star polish is a veneer concealing his own worries about old choices and new musical challenges. The pair are sketched like characters in yaoi manga, the Japanese Boy Love genre, complete with bangs and emo arguments. The stilted dialogue, possibly meant to imitate youthful indecision, surfaces in clumps between long stretches of description and angst-ridden self-scrutiny. The underdeveloped characters and teen-diary–like passages mar an otherwise valuable portrayal of how an anxiety disorder affects seemingly functional people (like Bellamy) and erratically shapes all aspects of their lives. The band's unofficial manager, Quinn, is a more intriguing character for his lack of navel-gazing and almost demands his own story. The music festival/road trip trope also verges on something poignant but is oddly dated, as if a recounting of secondhand stories of Woodstock or Vans Warped Tour. The overall effect is of a m/m boy-band fan-fic YA recast unconvincingly as a new-adult romance.
A pair of pretty musicians, a hesitant attraction that flowers on a concert bus tour, and sophomoric sensibilities trying to grapple with existential questions. For fans of boy manga and K-pop.Pub Date: July 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62649-591-3
Page Count: 253
Publisher: Riptide
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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
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