A cross-country trip through Americana with small delights throughout and a few bumps in the road.
A road-trip novel traces a man’s spiritual journey as he follows the path of his grandparents across the country.
Bobby—a hyperwealthy investor living on the central coast of California with his wife, Rebecca—travels back to his Kentucky home for his mother’s funeral. There, Rebecca discovers the diaries of Bobby’s maternal grandfather, Stephen. Bobby doesn’t want to look at the diaries, but Rebecca begins to read them and discovers the story of how Stephen and his wife, Hazel, met in the late 1920s in Los Angeles, married, and then moved back across the country to be missionaries. Rebecca forces her husband to plan a visit to Los Angeles to see Stephen’s old home, and they pack up Bobby’s vintage 1929 Pierce Arrow to make the drive. There, they meet up with Amy, a young historian, who takes an intense interest in Stephen’s diaries. She comes up with a little tour for Bobby and Rebecca. Bobby, impelled by some unknown inspiration, decides that he and Rebecca must continue to retrace his grandfather’s trek across Route 66 and hires Amy to be their guide. They follow Stephen’s travels through the American Southwest, the Midwest, and finally to Kentucky, finishing at his chapel. The trip engages Bobby in a way he never thought possible, making him rethink his faith and behavior. But it also dredges up some painful memories and occasionally the worse side of his personality—the so-called “Evil Bob.” Sewell (Fishing for Light, 2013, etc.) adeptly builds a makeshift family out of Bobby, Rebecca, and Amy, each with his or her own foibles and strengths, and the three characters have a pleasing development throughout the story. The decision to portray Bobby as obscenely wealthy delivers contrasts for the narrative and easy money for the trip but also makes an already somewhat unlikable character difficult to relate to. In addition, the dialogue does not always ring true, especially with younger characters, who sometimes spout millennial clichés. Plotwise, the odyssey relies on a feeling of personal connection to the past that can be hard to universalize; the author is sometimes able to make this feeling vivid while other moments fall flat.
A cross-country trip through Americana with small delights throughout and a few bumps in the road.Pub Date: Dec. 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-692-98833-6
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Robert C. Hall
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Here, after last year's Of Love and Shadows, the tale of a quirky young woman's rise to influence in an unnamed South American country—with a delightful cast of exotic characters, but without the sure-handed plotting and leisurely grace of Allende's first—and best—book, The House of the Spirits (1985). When little Eva Luna's mother dies, the imaginative child is hired out to a string of eccentric families. During one of her periodic bouts of rebellion, she runs away and makes friends with Huberto Naranjo, a slick little street-kid. Years later, when she's in another bind, he finds her a place to stay in the red-light district—with a cheerful madame, La Senora, whose best friend is Melesio, a transvestite cabaret star. Everything's cozy until a new police sergeant takes over the district and disrupts the accepted system of corruption. Melesio drafts a protesting petition and is packed off to prison, and Eva's out on the street. She meets Riad Halabi, a kind Arab merchant with a cleft lip, who takes pity on her and whisks her away to the backwater village of Agua Santa. There, Eva keeps her savior's sulky wife Zulema company. Zulema commits suicide after a failed extramarital romance, and the previously loyal visitors begin to whisper about the relationship between Riad Halabi and Eva. So Eva departs for the capital—where she meets up with Melesio (now known as Mimi), begins an affair with Huberto Naranjo (now a famous rebel leader), and becomes casually involved in the revolutionary movement. Brimming with hothouse color, amply displayed in Allende's mellifluous prose, but the riot of character and incident here is surface effect; and the action—the mishaps of Eva—is toothless and vague. Lively entertainment, then, with little resonance.
Pub Date: Oct. 21, 1988
ISBN: 0241951658
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1988
A magical, deeply felt novel that breathes new life into an old genre.
A German teenager whose family moves to Alabama gets a deep-fried Southern gothic education.
Max is gifted, but if you’re thinking “honors student,” think again. He touches dead animals or withered plants and they return to life; whether his power (or curse, as Max thinks of it) works on dead people is part of the story’s suspense. The curse comes with pitfalls: Migraines besiege him after his resurrections, and he craves gobs of sugar. This insightful novel isn’t a fantasy, and Hudson treats Max’s gift as quite real. In addition, Hudson, an Alabama native, memorably evokes her home state, both its beauty and its warped rituals. Max’s father is an engineer, and the car company where he works has transferred him to a factory in Alabama; Max’s parents hope living there will give him a clean break from his troubled love for his dead classmate, Nils. Max is drawn to Pan, a witchy gay boy who wears dresses and believes in auras and incantations. Pan is the only person who knows about Max’s power. But Max also becomes enchanted with the Judge, a classmate's powerful father who’s running for governor and is vociferous about his astringent faith in Christ after an earlier life of sin (it's hard to read the novel and not think of Judge Roy Moore, who ran for U.S. Senate from Alabama, as the Judge’s real-life analogue). The Judge has plans for Max, who feels torn between his love for outcast Pan and the feeling of belonging the Judge provides. But that belonging has clear costs; the Judge likes to test potential believers by dosing them with poison. The real believers survive. Hudson invokes the tropes of Alabama to powerful effect: the bizarre fundamentalism; the religion of football; the cultlike unification of church and state. The tropes run the risk of feeling hackneyed, but this is Southern gothic territory, after all. Hudson brings something new to that terrain: an overt depiction of queer desire, welcome because writers such as Capote’s and McCullers’ depictions of queerness were so occluded.
A magical, deeply felt novel that breathes new life into an old genre.Pub Date: May 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63149-629-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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