An entertaining, sometimes lurid tale of creativity and corruption hampered by an unconvincing love story.
A young musician finds interracial, gender-bending love and gangland trouble in the Windy City in this Jazz Age gay romance.
This second installment of Stookey’s Medicine for the Blues Trilogy takes piano player Jimmy Harper and his band, the Diggs Munro Jazz Orchestra, away from sedate Portland, Oregon, to Chicago, the epicenter of jazz in 1923. There, Jimmy plunges into a throbbing demimonde of illicit sex, illegal booze, and disreputable music. He visits a whorehouse and, after a liaison with a woman to prove his manhood to his band mates, observes a kinky threesome involving two male sex workers and Danny Felton, a louche but menacing bootlegger who takes a shine to him. Jimmy gravitates to Pluto’s Lair, Danny’s speak-easy, where he beholds Erica DeChez, a mesmerizing drag chanteuse who cleans up to become handsome Black jazz pianist Eric Halsey. Eric teaches Jimmy how to play jazz right; shows him Chicago’s South Side clubs and blues parties; and switches between male and female personas to introduce him to both sides of anal sex. They fall rapturously in love and dream of running off to Paris together. Alas, Chicago turns dark for them. Jimmy quits the band when Diggs refuses to play the edgy, hot jazz the pianist loves, which is too Black for well-paying White venues. Danny offers Jimmy a job playing at Pluto’s, but at a price: an assaultive sexual tryst that leaves him bleeding and woozy from a heroin injection the bootlegger forced him to take at gunpoint. Finally, Jimmy learns that Eric is involved in a plot to oust Danny from Pluto’s and take it over with the help of Irish gangsters, a scheme that threatens to end in a tommy-guns-blazing showdown.
Following up on Acquaintance (2017), Stookey presents another panorama of gay life in the ’20s, full of vivid details and lively prose. He’s proficient at piquant feminine voices, whether hard-bitten (“ ‘It’s okay,’ she laughed her peculiar hollow laugh. ‘If you can’t trust a whore, who can you trust?’ ”), vengeful (“Where is that no good, two-timin’, yellow-bellied dog?”), or catty (“Sister Erica, have you been sucking on this sweet youngster?” “Now, talk nice, Anabella, or I’ll scratch your eyes out”). Through Jimmy’s ears, the author ably conveys the thrilling, haunting sound of Chicago’s jazz efflorescence, from jaunty swing—“Everything was feeling and intuition and pulsating, rhythmic drive…a looseness that allowed growing and slackening tempos, improvisations, creative surprise and freshness”—to searing blues. (“It seemed that all hell had broken loose—a petrifying terror, a desolate loneliness…with all his rough-hewn style, with all the gravel and whiskey in his voice, Grandy’s tenor fell on Jimmy’s ear with a melodious rightness, and his facility with the guitar, slurring the notes to match the human voice, all fit together.”) There are vibrant characters here and a creepily charismatic villain in Danny, but, as in Acquaintance, the romantic protagonists are kind of dull. Jimmy is a naïf—“Why must there be this animosity between the races?”—and Eric is a paragon of sexual enlightenment. Their glossy couplings (“Soon the surging reached its climax and the rising tide of their passion washed up pearls of sea foam”) feel off-key in a cynical city.
An entertaining, sometimes lurid tale of creativity and corruption hampered by an unconvincing love story.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-73260-361-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pictograph Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A bumpkin duke and a young woman belatedly acquiring a gentlewoman’s education make for an entertaining love story.
When a Regency duke would rather feed blancmange to his prize pig than pay court to prospective brides, it’s fortunate that the girl next door also likes pigs.
Anthony Farr, Duke of Radcliffe survived an unhappy first marriage and is deathly afraid of marrying again. He would rather spend his days pottering about on his farm and skipping stones on the lake with his 8-year-old son, Wakefield. But when a poor relation of the Penhallow family arrives in the neighborhood, she quickly becomes friends with both Anthony and Wakefield. Where Anthony is simple and even childlike, Jane Kent is just uneducated and still suffering from the traumas of spending her early life in poverty. In their first encounter, afternoon tea in the company of Jane’s relatives turns into a fierce competition. Jane and Anthony are both determined to devour more food than the other—all while maintaining a polite facade. It’s the first of many deftly funny scenes in the novel, although some of the jokes become a little repetitive, such as Wakefield’s frequent mispronunciations of long words. The dialogue, too, is both funny and a little tiresome, with long conversations that don’t significantly advance the plot. But the book has other strengths that set it apart from typical Regency romances. It’s body-positive. There are several scenes where Jane, Anthony, and Wakefield demolish decadent food. There’s also a little light sadomasochism, which feels surprising since the main characters are otherwise so childlike. And it's a nice portrait of what courtship is like for a dedicated single parent. The child and his needs are central to the love story.
A bumpkin duke and a young woman belatedly acquiring a gentlewoman’s education make for an entertaining love story.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-285237-3
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Mystery meets romance meets the paranormal in this glossy golden age of Hollywood thriller.
In 1930s California, a psychic hires an investigator to help her figure out who's trying to kill her.
Prudence Ryland—that is, Madame Ariadne—is a dream interpreter who decides to leave San Francisco and move to the Los Angeles area to pursue her goal of opening a bookstore focused on paranormal literature. Just before she can depart, a client shows up determined to murder her. In quick succession, she escapes, moves to Southern California, becomes a research librarian, and is kidnapped from the stacks and framed for murder in a purported sex game gone wrong involving an expensive blood-spotted wedding gown, a knife, and a very dead heir to a fortune. And then, after her escape from this new situation, she's fired. What follows is her collaboration with consultant Jack Wingate in figuring out what's going on. Sparks fly, and Prudence and Jack end up falling for each other. The story focuses mostly on the long burn of the relationship-to-be, complete with smoldering looks and extensive conversations about the paranormal and the dividing line between intuition and psychic energy as the two seek to unravel the mystery that brought them together. After a very strong, engaging start, author Quick slows down the narrative, focusing almost entirely on telling the story through the conversations between Jack and Prudence and/or the secondary characters: A man with mob connections, a private investigator, businesswomen, heirs, servants, psychics, and librarians all play their parts. Though a bit repetitive, the story seems ready-made for adaptation as a play, television series, or movie.
Mystery meets romance meets the paranormal in this glossy golden age of Hollywood thriller.Pub Date: May 2, 2023
ISBN: 9780593337868
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Berkley
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
