A well-crafted, if not groundbreaking, tale about a gay teen in the Midwest.
A debut novel introduces a gay teenager coming-of-age in 1970s Detroit.
Jamie Goldberg’s mother takes him out of school to attend protests and single-handedly forces his district’s desegregation (which makes him something of a pariah). His father ignores him in favor of watching Detroit Tigers games on TV. As Jamie’s sexuality develops, he’s filled with an unshakable sense of guilt. He knows he should be attracted to the women in the Playboy that his brother gives him, but he can’t help but fantasize about a male classmate instead. Jamie hopes to talk to his older cousin Harold about these feelings (he has intimated that he might be the same way). But then Harold dies tragically of a heroin overdose. Jamie finds solace in Hesse, Nietzsche, and the operas of Wagner. “The music was also obscenely sensual to me,” he writes of Tannhäuser. “Ecstatic thoughts could freely float in and out of my mind, unattached to anyone or anything. The music had no gender.” After a stranger takes his virginity at age 15, Jamie realizes he has crossed a line that can’t be uncrossed. While he wishes to escape to New York and a new life, he is forced by circumstances to remain in Detroit for college. Even so, college provides him an avenue to explore all the things he’s spent his adolescence hoping for (and fearing): music, theater, love, community—and a world where, to many people, he is a pervert. Can Jamie ever overcome his guilt, silence his fears, and find happiness in a life so different from the one he was raised to expect? In his series opener, Taylor tells the story from Jamie’s perspective in a polished prose enlivened with the protagonist’s neurotic humor: “He couldn’t reach his pen so I shot out of my chair and tried to pick it up. I accidentally knocked it away. I chased after it, picked it up, and handed the pen back to him. I plopped back down in my chair, hoping he’d forget the whole thing.” Jamie is thoughtful and highly sympathetic, and readers will be happy to follow him through the formative years of his youth. Taylor succeeds in capturing various moments (however painful or awkward) and revealing their importance. The author manages to illustrate the time and place of the novel with sharply selected details, contextualizing Jamie’s development in surprising ways. But when readers consider the Proustian task Taylor has set out for himself—this 450-page book only gets Jamie through age 20, and more volumes will follow—they may begin to wonder if the topic is truly fertile enough for the scope of the project. Despite the wit and charm that the author brings to this bildungsroman, it’s difficult to say that it contains anything that hasn’t already been covered extensively in fiction (often in fewer pages). The prospect of future, similarly verbose works devoted to Jamie might not fill readers with the same enthusiasm that clearly motivates Taylor.
A well-crafted, if not groundbreaking, tale about a gay teen in the Midwest.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 462
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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