by Robert Gilberg ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A
Get your motor runnin’ and head out on the highway with this mellow thriller that offers an affable take on road movies.
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A retired satellite engineer encounters karma, love, and mayhem in Gilberg’s (Alice Chang, 2016) latest novel, set in the year 2012.
Starvation Mountain is 50-something Jim Schmidt’s “motorcycle playground”; its avocado groves and stunning views give him a respite from heartbreak and the Silicon Beach rat race. He plans to build a home there and spend his days exploring Southern California on his motorcycle. When he meets a “lanky California blonde” in the area who goes by the name of Penny Lane, it’s love at first sight. He invites her along on the motorcycle ride of a lifetime, retracing the same route from Los Angeles to New Orleans that was made famous in the 1969 film Easy Rider. But Jim’s new traveling companion comes with baggage: Penny’s former boss, Mack, is in serious trouble with some sketchy, downright homicidal men. With the bad guys in hot pursuit, it seems like Jim and Penny could share the Easy Rider characters’ grim fates. But they avoid this thanks to Jim’s survival instinct—and what could possibly be the ghost of James Dean, acting as a guardian angel. Gilberg’s previous novel, in which Jim appeared as a character, traded in the high stakes of the international thriller, but this follow-up takes more of a Laurel Canyon approach, opting for a story that owes more to New Hollywood than it does to James Bond. The thrills largely take second billing to the romance, the landscape, and the motorcycle-riding life. Still, Gilberg is careful not to shortchange the reader during the action scenes, which explode with well-crafted mayhem. The author occasionally overuses italics for emphasis, but this is a minor stylistic flaw in an otherwise highly enjoyable work. Gilberg’s clear affinity for all things ’60s, exemplified by a stream of classic-rock references, makes this a must-read for hog-lovin’ baby boomers.
Get your motor runnin’ and head out on the highway with this mellow thriller that offers an affable take on road movies.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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BOOK REVIEW
by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960
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
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by Harper Lee
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SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
by Caitlin Mullen ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 3, 2020
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.
In Atlantic City, the bodies of several women wait to be discovered and a young psychic begins having visions of terrible violence.
They are known only as Janes 1 through 6, the women who have been strangled and left in the marsh behind the seedy Sunset Motel. They wait for someone to miss them, to find them. That someone might be Clara, a teenage dropout who works the Atlantic City strip as a psychic and occasionally has visions. She can tell there's something dangerous at work, but she has other problems. To pay the rent, she begins selling her company, and then her body, to older men. One day she meets Lily, another young woman who'd escaped the depressing decay of Atlantic City for New York only to be betrayed by a man. She’s come back to AC because there’s nowhere else to go, and she spends her time working a dead-end job and drinking herself into oblivion. Together, Clara and Lily may be able to figure out the truth—but they will each lose something along the way. Mullen’s style is subtle, flowing; she switches the narrative voice with each chapter, giving us Clara and Lily but also each of the victims. At the heart of the novel lies the bitter observation that “Women get humiliated every day, in small stupid ways and in huge, disastrous ones.” Mullen writes about all the moments that women compromise themselves in the face of male desire and male power and how they learn to use sex as commerce because “men are always promised this, no matter who they are.” The other major character in the novel is Atlantic City itself: fading; falling to ruin; promising an old sort of glamour that no longer exists; swindling sad, lonely people out of their money. This backdrop is unexpected and well rendered.
A lyrical, incisive, and haunting debut.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-2748-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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