The early days of a jam band show it’s all been a long, strange trip.
Although this debut novel from the pseudonymous Mae opens with the demise of jam band Too Cubed, it’s not long before the story finds its true beginning: the back story of the original four members and how they bond through their love of psychedelic music and a fabulously pure and potent form of acid. This first installment of a four-book series—with a fifth volume available for reference—takes readers from the early days of Too Cubed until they are poised for takeoff with a new bassist in tow. Like-minded souls Stan, Max, Bert and Trip rally behind Stan’s controlling nature. The eight man lineup, musically structured like the Grateful Dead, drops acid nonstop and endeavors to stretch musical boundaries while seeking collective enlightenment. Each of the four main characters is written with a distinct, stereotype-free personality, as is Olly, the Hawaiian drummer Stan encounters on vacation and coaxes into leaving paradise for the cold Massachusetts winter. Too much of the text, however, is given over to Grateful Dead shows, drug dealing and dropping acid; passages describing concerts, parties and hallucinations drag. But when the band members are allowed to roam the page, a wonderfully hypnotic narrative rhythm develops and it’s hard to put the book down. While there’s not much at stake for the band—small problems are glossed over and big ones dealt with by a literal stroll on thin ice—it’s clear the next volume will pick up where this one ends. The unconventional novelistic structure is as gleefully loose and laid back as the band whose story it tells. Seasoned veterans of the psychedelic music scene may see parallels to modern-day band Phish but the heavy drug use may turn off outsiders.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-0984598106
Page Count: 394
Publisher: Lonna Mae Enterprises
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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
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