A quiet yet engrossing exploration of the period following a cultural revolution.
A novel focuses on drugs, free love, and one man’s daily escapades in mid-1970s San Francisco.
Billy Johnson is just getting by, but he seems mostly OK with that. He likes to read works by Beat poets; he toils at a T-shirt shop in the Haight (though he would like to be a writer); and he drives a Volkswagen bus named Kozmic. In his downtime, he enjoys a lot of drugs and dabbles in romance. While Billy casually dates Ti, he also has his eye on Lannie and her “frustrating elusiveness.” Throughout this drama, Billy remains mainly passive, adapting to his various situations. Yet there’s also a quiet sadness to him, as when he reminisces about an ex-girlfriend and their dreams. The couple thought they “could find a way to rent a house over here…leapfrog the bay to Marin, where hippies lived in paradise.” But he faces a huge shock when he discovers his roommate chose suicide. Later, when Billy gets the opportunity to pen a magazine article, his dreams of writing are renewed, but his deepening relationship with Lannie and his increasing drug use may have dire consequences. The vibrant Bay Area locales that Billy visits are the true stars of Mater’s story: “At Broadway, I crossed with the crowd, then entered City Lights Books, passing through the main room with its novels of the moment, browsing tourists, and perishable magazines.” Yet Billy’s near aimlessness, along with the tale’s slow pace, is the book’s most intriguing aspect because it mirrors the purposelessness other characters feel living in the post–Summer of Love era. There are holdovers from previous cultural shifts: a woman who blows bubbles and peddles her poetry; all the Grateful Dead T-shirts that Billy sells; and his appreciation for the Beats and his inability to live up to them (“God, the standard they set”). The author highlights the characters’ desires to cling to the beautiful moments of their youths while examining how many are moving on. Constantina, one player, asserts: “I marched like we all did. What did it mean?…But that was then. This is now.” Mater’s novel is not an exciting page-turner, but his vivid descriptions of the city and his protagonist will draw readers in nonetheless.
A quiet yet engrossing exploration of the period following a cultural revolution.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73682-301-9
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Boulevard 55 Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.
An artwork’s value grows if you understand the stories of the people who inspired it.
Never in her wildest dreams would foster kid Louisa dream of meeting C. Jat, the famous painter of The One of the Sea, which depicts a group of young teens on a pier on a hot summer’s day. But in Backman’s latest, that’s just what happens—an unexpected (but not unbelievable) set of circumstances causes their paths to collide right before the dying 39-year-old artist’s departure from the world. One of his final acts is to bequeath that painting to Louisa, who has endured a string of violent foster homes since her mother abandoned her as a child. Selling the painting will change her life—but can she do it? Before deciding, she accompanies Ted, one of the artist’s close friends and one of the young teens captured in that celebrated painting, on a train journey to take the artist’s ashes to his hometown. She wants to know all about the painting, which launched Jat’s career at age 14, and the circle of beloved friends who inspired it. The bestselling author of A Man Called Ove (2014) and other novels, Backman gives us a heartwarming story about how these friends, set adrift by the violence and unhappiness of their homes, found each other and created a new definition of family. “You think you’re alone,” one character explains, “but there are others like you, people who stand in front of white walls and blank paper and only see magical things. One day one of them will recognize you and call out: ‘You’re one of us!’” As Ted tells stories about his friends—how Jat doubted his talents but found a champion in fiery Joar, who took on every bully to defend him; how Ali brought an excitement to their circle that was “like a blinding light, like a heart attack”—Louisa recognizes herself as a kindred soul and feels a calling to realize her own artistic gifts. What she decides to do with the painting is part of a caper worthy of the stories that Ted tells her. The novel is humorous, poignant, and always life-affirming, even when describing the bleakness of the teens’ early lives. “Art is a fragile magic, just like love,” as someone tells Louisa, “and that’s humanity’s only defense against death.”
A tender and moving portrait about the transcendent power of art and friendship.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9781982112820
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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