A spellbinding road trip.
A man and his buddy’s corpse journey through the South and its musical legacy in this novel.
It’s 1978, and washed-up folk singer Jim Logan is hanging out in New Orleans with his friend and one-time guitar partner Tom Parrish when Tom up and dies. Fulfilling a promise, Jim sticks Tom in a pine coffin, loads him into a 1951 Ford Country Squire station wagon, and sets out to drive him to Richmond, Virginia, for an improvised burial—all the while pursued by lowlifes in a Chrysler who want to retrieve a valuable diamond Tom swallowed before he died. That’s all the plot device needed to propel this luxurious shaggy dog story onward as Jim drives the back roads, observes the world passing by, and reminisces about his past, goaded by mellow conversational interjections from the voice of Tom’s ghost. The loose-jointed tale unfolds in episodic chapters, almost stand-alone short stories, that introduce Jim to people and places with a musical resonance. He visits the grave of a Delta bluesman; bestows his guitar on a poor boy; gives a ride to a woman in red singing a mysterious song; tours the Shiloh battlefield and discovers a Union soldier’s letter home describing the music of runaway slaves; and visits Elvis Presley’s birthplace, finding it a site of brisk commerce and heartbroken recollections for fans of the King. Jim also meets Chilly Antone, the once-well-known Senator of Western Swing, lobbying to get into the Country Music Hall of Fame; buys a banjo from a hillbilly luthier; spends an afternoon with an old flame; and drinks with other women, hard-boiled and softhearted, in various bars where honky-tonk jukebox soundtracks play in the background. Heslin’s (The Collapse of the Broadway Central, 2018) atmospheric yarn is less a linear narrative than a collection of character studies, landscapes, and soundscapes tied together by Jim’s ruminations on his own and the nation’s souls. It takes in an America of small-town cafes featuring seen-it-all waitresses, stolid national park rangers putting a wholesome face on the bloody chaos of the past, and the ceaseless current of traffic on highways washing past an archipelago of gas stations, set to the ubiquitous sound of pop, rock, and country and braying AM disk jockeys. The author skillfully evokes all these varied voices, from washerwomen to drunken sailors to prim grandmothers, in vignettes that are by turns pungent, funny, melancholy, and wistful, all rendered in a wonderfully impressionistic vernacular that brings to mind a blend of Faulkner and Kerouac. (“In the middle of a thunderstorm, smack inside the corporate limit of Burma Shave, you pick up Bessie Smith and you think you must be drifting off, there’s been no broadcast since the chicken and cornbread at Pep’s Missing Link Cafe, forty miles or so, but there she is, courtesy of a handful of watts somewhere, there she is on the outskirts of winter wheat with the victrola in her voice and your tank more full than empty.”) It’s not always clear where Jim and Tom are headed, but readers who like superb prose and compelling characters will be happy to ride along.
A spellbinding road trip.Pub Date: May 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-941138-92-2
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Three Knolls Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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