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
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
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
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