A loving, if uneven, tribute to an era that may resonate with readers who wish to return to its heady, idealistic days.
Gould (Let's Play Ball, 2010, etc.) tells the story of three young women caught up in the turbulent rock-music scene of the late 1960s.
Candy Collins, Hope Witmer, and Theda Brooks are high school students in suburban Maryland who witness the beginnings of a student rock band called Homegrown. Preston Andrews, the brash leader, plays guitar; the more reserved Neal McNab plays electric piano; and football player Brad Callahan plays drums before he’s replaced by Clive O’Dell. After the band receives an invitation from Apple Studios to audition, the girls accompany them to London. Shy, bookish Candy sees the trip as a chance to get closer to Preston, while Hope and Theda see it as an adventure with their boyfriends, Neal and Clive. Apple Studios is in disarray, but the band plays backup there for a famous folk singer, Ty Leahy, morphing his acoustic sound into something more electric; the girls also finally get a chance to help with the songs. The band renames itself AMO and opens a show for the darker, edgier band JPJ. After disaster ensues, they flee to Clive’s cousin’s commune in northern Scotland. The cousin, Father Flanagan, is a radical, pacifist priest who engages their spiritual sides. He officiates the couples’ marriages before the band tries to make it big in Los Angeles, where they connect with “Pretty Boy” Floyd Worth, a radical UCLA professor who’s also the promoter of a big music festival. Gould mostly does a fine job of keeping the plot fast-paced and engaging, with plenty of plot twists along the way. However, the characters could have been more fully developed and given more complex motivations. The prose is very dialogue-heavy, which sometimes bogs down the story. Era-specific details provide nice touches, but Gould’s descriptions often don’t give readers a clear sense of place, despite the diversity of locales. The reverence that the characters all have for music, however, is infectious, and it will likely be enough to keep most readers engaged with this novel until its end.
A loving, if uneven, tribute to an era that may resonate with readers who wish to return to its heady, idealistic days.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4917-4543-4
Page Count: 290
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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