A vibrant, creative, youthful yarn about personal freedom and self-discovery played out against an American West backdrop.
An adventure tale charts the spiritual and personal evolution of an uneasy former engineer.
Das's (Catching Babies, 2011, etc.) novel centers on the wanderlust plaguing a man who, at 37, flees “the steady grind of a corporate job Back East to the wild blur of the mountains Out West” to embrace his love of the outdoors. After the company he works for is sold and he ends his nine-year marriage, Jack moves west to realize his dream of living on his own in nature: “No wife, no job, no kids, no worries, just me, the earth, the sky, and time.” He settles in Dudeville, a Colorado ski town that he was introduced to through friends. As Jack crests numerous mountaintops, Das writes compassionately and poetically about his protagonist’s uncanny detection of a spiritual presence guiding him, an “unnamed and unfiltered, indescribable but unmistakable” deity embodying the euphoric feeling of freedom in nature. Other characters drift in and out of Jack’s orbit, including Jill, his sometime girlfriend, and climbing pal Danny, while the scenery oscillates from snowboarding on the ski slopes and ascending mountains to facing the melodrama of Dudeville’s hangout bar. Das fleshes out Jack’s character with memories of his bruised childhood at the hands of a drunken father and a mother hobbled by debilitating pain. Yet the author leavens this with episodes involving jam bands, a pack of wolves, pot smoking and Ecstasy, sex, and plenty of free-flowing, “dude”-laden dialogue, which all blurs together as the narrative ebbs and flows. The gang scales the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada and moves across the Arizona desert canyons and the scorched Wyoming plains, inviting further spiritual awakenings and opportunities for reflection and inner healing for Jack. But it will be the interpersonal swirl of youthful histrionics, beer gulping, and high-fives that will keep readers who enjoy the lighter side of Das's bro-fiction entertained. Nature lovers and adventure travelers will certainly appreciate the author’s lush, descriptive prose and vivid action scenes, most notably when focused on Jack’s love of the natural world, his aloneness within it, and the breathless beauty surrounding him when atop a mountain glazed in snow and dazzling sunlight. His restlessness resumes by the story’s conclusion, leaving the engine running for further possible escapades on the slopes and beyond.
A vibrant, creative, youthful yarn about personal freedom and self-discovery played out against an American West backdrop.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-97776-7
Page Count: 433
Publisher: Bayamet LLC
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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