A nostalgic portrayal of social upheaval in the 1960s that’s sure to strike a chord with those who lived it.
In this novel set amid the looming threat of the draft in the 1960s, small-town teens create their own revolution as they take on their local radio station’s narrow-minded refusal to play Motown records.
In 1965, Lake Calloway, a small tourist town in northern Michigan, has managed to remain sheltered from social and political tensions that have been rising across the nation. But as Cooper, Eddie, Mike and Dennis look forward to the commencement of their senior year, they have no idea that things in their provincial town are about to be shaken up. The arrival of the town’s first black family brings latent racial tensions to the surface not only for their son, Victor, also a senior, but also for the boys who enthusiastically welcome him into their little crew. Meanwhile, evidence of a budding sexual revolution and use of the birth control pill become apparent when the school hires a young home economics teacher, Janet Carlsen, to incorporate sex education into Lake Calloway’s curriculum for the first time ever. As the school year begins, Eddie’s biggest concern is getting his boss at the radio station to loosen the reins on the heavily regulated list of preapproved rock songs Eddie is allowed to play; he’s eager to play some Motown, which is currently prohibited because it’s made by black artists. But when the boys turn 18 and receive their draft cards, they can no longer remain neutral on growing social and political movements. Victor helps his friends understand that sharing the contraband records over their small-town airwaves could actually ignite a much-needed revolution in Lake Calloway. Though Heininger’s debut novel offers a vibrant, memorable cast of well-developed characters, it’s unclear who the intended audience is; young protagonists and the high school coming-of-age setting suggest a YA audience, yet the novel is steeped in the type of nostalgia more suited to the crowd who actually experienced the 1960s. Furthermore, the framing of a sultry affair between Miss Carlsen and one of her students—“Cooper had suddenly been transported into teen-boy heaven”—as part of a social, political, racial and sexual revolution neglects to address some of the subtler implications of a sexual relationship between teacher and student, which may leave readers feeling a bit unsettled.
A nostalgic portrayal of social upheaval in the 1960s that’s sure to strike a chord with those who lived it.Pub Date: March 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4929-2375-6
Page Count: 226
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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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