An expansive historical novel that ably evokes its time and place.
Hunt, in his first novel, tells the story of two musicians trying to make it in the late-1980s Chicago scene.
Jonathan Starks and Scott Marshall were only supposed to come to Chicago for a party, but when the opportunity to rent a rehearsal space presents itself, the Columbus musicians jump at the chance to start fresh in the big city in 1988. Jonathan sings, plays keyboard, and gets all the attention, even if he thinks the comparisons that he gets to the late Joy Division vocalist Ian Curtis are facile. He feels guilty about leaving his girlfriend, Amy, behind in Ohio—she’s done so much to help him grow as a person, after all—but the Windy City has no shortage of beautiful women to inspire his songwriting. Scott’s personal darkness is rooted in the death of his childhood friend, Sammy, who met a violent end years ago. He’s afraid of being abandoned again, and of getting taken for granted. It becomes clear that ambition can bring people together, but it can also serve as a wedge between old friends. Jonathan and Scott change their sound to fit in with the local craze for a new genre of music: “It’s music for your body to move to,” says Jonathan. “Electronic body music.” They recruit new members and are reborn as a group called Mercurial Visions. They find success, but not so much that the failures of their pasts don’t catch up with them, with some deadly consequences. Hunt writes in a dense, passionate prose that strives to enliven everything it touches. His description of a photographer could easily describe himself as an author: “His eyes seek; they’re always hunting, locking onto things for a moment….He’s like a hawk scanning the ground for something small and hard to see to swoop down upon and catch.” The intensity of the language, though, grows somewhat exhausting over the book’s 400-plus pages, particularly when combined with the obsessiveness of the main characters. That said, Hunt successfully conjures the story’s time and a place in masterful detail. Jonathan and Scott are not quite likable, but they are recognizable as the kind of ruthlessly creative types who find success only when they can keep their demons in check.
An expansive historical novel that ably evokes its time and place.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5320-1012-5
Page Count: 434
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A celebratory song of the sea.
A shrimpy 13-year-old with a super-sized passion for marine life comes of age during a summer of discovery on the tidal flats of Puget Sound.
Miles O’Malley—Squid Boy to his friends—doesn’t mind being short. It’s other things that keep him awake at night, like his parents’ talk of divorce and his increasingly lustful thoughts about the girl next door. Mostly, though, it’s the ocean’s siren call that steals his sleep. During one of his moonlit kayak excursions, Miles comes across the rarest sighting ever documented in the northern Pacific: the last gasp of a Giant Squid. Scientists are stunned. The media descend. As Miles continues to stumble across other oddball findings, including two invasive species that threaten the eco-balance of Puget Sound, a nearby new-age cult’s interest in Miles prompts a headline in USA Today: Kid Messiah? Soon tourists are flocking to the tidal flats, crushing crustaceans underfoot and painting their bodies with black mud. Dodging disingenuous journalists, deluded disciples and the death-throes of his parents’ marriage, Miles tries to recapture some semblance of normality. He reads up on the G-spot and the Kama Sutra to keep pace with his pals’ bull sessions about sex (hilariously contributing “advanced” details that gross the other boys out). But Miles’s aquatic observations cannot be undone, and as summer draws to a close, inhabitants of Puget Sound prepare for a national blitzkrieg of media and scientific attention and the highest tide in 40 years, all of which threatens everything Miles holds dear. On land, the rickety plot could have used some shoring up. Miles is just too resourceful for the reader to believe his happiness—or that of those he loves—is ever at stake. But when Miles is on the water, Lynch’s first novel becomes a stunning light show, both literal, during phosphorescent plankton blooms, and metaphorical, in the poetic fireworks Lynch’s prose sets off as he describes his clearly beloved Puget Sound.
A celebratory song of the sea.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2005
ISBN: 1-58234-605-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Paulsen recalls personal experiences that he incorporated into Hatchet (1987) and its three sequels, from savage attacks by moose and mosquitoes to watching helplessly as a heart-attack victim dies. As usual, his real adventures are every bit as vivid and hair-raising as those in his fiction, and he relates them with relish—discoursing on “The Fine Art of Wilderness Nutrition,” for instance: “Something that you would never consider eating, something completely repulsive and ugly and disgusting, something so gross it would make you vomit just looking at it, becomes absolutely delicious if you’re starving.” Specific examples follow, to prove that he knows whereof he writes. The author adds incidents from his Iditarod races, describes how he made, then learned to hunt with, bow and arrow, then closes with methods of cooking outdoors sans pots or pans. It’s a patchwork, but an entertaining one, and as likely to win him new fans as to answer questions from his old ones. (Autobiography. 10-13)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-32650-5
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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