An enormously fun and addictively readable story of redemption in the seedy world of stadium rock music.
In Jayce’s fiction debut, a washed-up music producer will do anything to find a lost album—or die trying.
Jensen Bennett is separated from his wife, on the wrong side of 30, the lap dog of his employer at Wicked Records, and facing an enormous bouncer who won’t let him backstage to see the hit group Quiet Catastrophe. Bennett discovered the band and shepherded them to stardom with their first two albums, but his own rotten behavior has alienated him from the group. Wicked Records has heard a rumor that the band has breached their contract by secretly recording their third album, House Made of Sound, and Bennett has been dispatched to get the master recordings by any means necessary. With the help of a lovely medium named Daphne, he gets backstage at last but finds nothing—so he stows away on the band’s plane, hoping for a chance to steal the album and somehow get his life back on track. Instead, the plane crashes, and when Bennett wakes up, he’s in some kind of afterlife; he’s told that although his mortal body is still back at the crash site clinging to life, the members of Quiet Catastrophe are as “dead as disco,” leaving Bennett with the task of finding them in this weird paradise and learning the location of that elusive third album before he’s pulled back to life. From these strange elements, the author has carefully constructed an absolutely winning story, a rousing, funny, and surprisingly moving tale of love lost (as Bennett points out to himself, he hasn’t loved many people in his life—but he’d loved the lead singer of Quiet Catastrophe, back when they’d been as close as brothers) and love found (Daphne’s assistance may serve as the prelude to a real romance). Jayce’s elegant prose is a joy to read: “But now the void, familiar and unwelcome, had come home. His thoughts returned to the empty wallet, and to the ousted presidents that once held office there.” Readers won’t want the novel to end.
An enormously fun and addictively readable story of redemption in the seedy world of stadium rock music.Pub Date: March 11, 2023
ISBN: 9798218174378
Page Count: 393
Publisher: Miller's Arch Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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
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
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