An often intriguing and emotional look at lives on and off the road.
Roadies take a break from touring to rethink their lives in Black’s novel.
The people who work for rock star Sadie Estrada are like family, for good or ill. Among them are Alex, the tour electrician, and Lily, Sadie’s long-suffering personal assistant. Alex loves her job, but when she discovers that she’s pregnant, she quits to settle down with her boyfriend, Connor. He feels panicky about the baby, as he already has a grown daughter whose life he’s not much involved with. Then Alex miscarries, and she decides to return to tour life—although some of the joy is gone now that she no longer has seniority. During a concert in Italy, part of the rig falls and injures Sadie, and the crew blames Alex even though she knows she had nothing to do with it. The four women roadies on the tour—Alex, Lily, and two other stagehands—decide to rent a house in Tuscany for a vacation while the tour is stalled, and they bond on their trip. Lily is fed up with the abuse she gets from Sadie; Alex talks about her miscarriage and how painful it was. The pair think about staying in Italy, but their lives manage to catch up with them. Seeing the world of rock performance through the eyes of the roadies takes some of the glam away—they work hard, stay in bad hotels, and travel so much they can’t keep track of where they are, as noted in the title. This aspect of the novel is compelling, as most novels about rock bands follow around the musicians and not the behind-the-scenes crew. But although the plot moves quickly, it feels more like a mere series of events than an arc, and the ending leaves a few things unresolved. Still, Black does a nice job of describing the Tuscany setting, as when the vacationing women reach their destination in a remote village: “The rental house sat two hundred feet beyond a tall stone wall and looked like a place where even the most tightly wound show tech could rest.”
An often intriguing and emotional look at lives on and off the road.Pub Date: May 31, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 236
Publisher: TouchPoint Press
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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