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THE ANOMALIES

Name: THE ANOMALIES
Author: Joey Goebel
ISBN: 1-931561-29-X

by Joey Goebel ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2003

Dispensing with plot, Goebel wings it, credibility take the hindmost. It doesn’t work.

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First novel by the 21-year-old Goebel, former lead singer of the punk band The Mullets: a tale of five oddballs who form a rock band in small-town Kentucky:

Watch them make heads turn: the wild-eyed young black man (Luster); the smoking hot blonde in the wheelchair (Aurora); the feisty octogenarian in the cowboy boots (Opal); the hellraising third-grader Opal baby-sits (Ember); and an effeminate Iraqi (Ray). These are the eponymous Anomalies, who’ve come together under Luster’s direction to play “power-pop new wave heavy metal punk rock.” The players are introduced awkwardly, by multiple narrators in writing that stumbles from social realism to cartoonish whimsy. Thus protagonist Luster is both an industrious commissary runner at a dog-racing track and a lonely Mr. Clean in a family of drug-dealers (12 brothers, all called Jerome). What becomes clear soon enough is that this messy debut is the latest report from the front in America’s never-ending cultural clash between the Hip and the Square, between free spirits and those whom Luster contemptuously dismisses as “humanoids.” Unfortunately, Goebel’s formulation is tired (the humanoids “are all hooked up to the same giant mechanical brain”) and the battle lines not sharply drawn. We are left with a buzz of angry voices. Aurora is so angry with the predatory guys who keep hitting on her that she takes refuge in a wheelchair, though there is nothing wrong with her; Opal is angry with her nieces and her therapist; Luster and Ember are angry with just about everybody. Four angry band members, all fired up with nowhere to go. The exception is Ray, a gentle soul who has drifted over from Vonnegut country. His quixotic mission is to find and apologize to the GI he wounded in the Gulf War. He succeeds, but the unintended consequence is that the band’s one and only gig descends into bloody mayhem.

Dispensing with plot, Goebel wings it, credibility take the hindmost. It doesn’t work.

Pub Date: April 16, 2003

ISBN: 1-931561-29-X

Page Count: 208

Publisher: MacAdam/Cage

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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DISTANT SHORES

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2002

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...

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Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.

After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?

Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).

Pub Date: July 1, 2002

ISBN: 0-345-45071-X

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

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A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.