by Kirk Anthony Vollack ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 29, 2018
A fictional tale for metal heads that offers all the simple pleasures of a real-life rock-and-roll memoir.
Vollack (The Red Staircase, 2017) offers a novel of youth, ambition, and the heavy-metal music scene of the 1980s.
“We were headbangers, and heavy metal was our theme music,” the author writes in the prologue to his raucous novel about what he calls the “soundtrack of the suburbs.” Junior high schooler Mark Magruder is an aspiring drummer in a Denver suburb who listens to the music of such acts as Judas Priest, Van Halen, and Ozzy Osbourne. Due to a misunderstanding, he and his classmate James Graves almost get into a fistfight over a girl; eventually, though, they find common ground, which leads them to form a heavy-metal band. Initially, Mark plays drums, but he’s later promoted to lead singer when another drummer and a bassist join the group; however, he notes that he “would probably have played friggin’ tambourine if it meant staying in the band.” Over the course of several years, Mark learns some important lessons about performing (“my first lesson of rock singing: Presence is everything”). Overall, this coming-of-age tale features a fair amount of drinking, band drama, and set-list discussion as well as relationship issues when Mark starts seeing a girl named Sara. Along the way, Vollack manages to successfully capture the aura of 1980s suburbia in general and its heavy-metal culture in particular as his characters go to see the band Iron Maiden in concert and have beer-keg parties; as he notes, “Headbangers need only the glorious grind of a power cord [sic] and the meaty thump of the kick-drum shaking their bones.” At times, the tone of Vollack’s prose verges on over-the-top machismo (“Singing for chicks. Hell yeah”), but this doesn’t stop it from taking readers on a nostalgia-filled trip into a bygone era, soundtrack in tow.
A fictional tale for metal heads that offers all the simple pleasures of a real-life rock-and-roll memoir.Pub Date: March 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9994232-2-6
Page Count: 426
Publisher: Anthony Shelton Publications
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960
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.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
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