A fun romp through the modern American West buttressed by earnest humor and a dash of history.
Dunn’s comedic novel features a wounded veteran and an itinerant dreamer.
Punxie Tawney is out on his own in the wilds of Washington state, panning for gold in much the same way the prospectors of yesteryear would have. Punxie is freshly back from a tour of duty in Iraq, and though he is up and about, readers quickly learn his tour ended when he was critically injured by a roadside IED while riding in an Army Humvee. Though Punxie might say his faculties are intact, he seems, if not psychologically bereft, to be searching for something or someone. This longing is no doubt exacerbated by the fact that while Punxie was away at war, both his mother and father died in rapid succession, leaving him an orphan. From across the shores of the river where he combs for precious ore, Punxie notices the also memorably named Hamilton Chance, another man ostensibly panning for gold who, Punxie soon learns, is driven by another goal. Hamilton, as he explains to Punxie, is descended from a long line of American patriots, most notably the men who led the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. Using that rebellion as a call to action, Hamilton’s sole purpose at this stage in his life is to establish a distillery in which he will make tax-free, all-American whiskey (the name of which, the men decide later on, will be “Westcoulatum Good Goddamned 1794 Freedom Whiskey”). Punxie, with little family or obligation tethering him to any one place, soon sets off with Hamilton, and the two of them “go fishing,” using their thumbs as “lures” to hitch a ride to the local library where Hamilton can teach Punxie about his family history. Punxie, perhaps somewhat conveniently, is taken quite quickly with the idea of Hamilton’s distillery and the notion of pure freedom it promises. Things are never so simple, though. When “The Aphrodite of Wenatchee,” otherwise known as Cherry, shows up with her friend Loyalhanna in tow, Punxie’s latent loneliness and desperation for contact—the same things that initially attached him to Hamilton—make it impossible for him to shun human connection, even if it gets in the way of 1794 Freedom Whiskey.
While Dunn’s novel is mostly humorous and generally lighthearted, his prose occasionally rises to the poetic, particularly when describing the landscape: “The sun was beginning to get tired of sterilizing Moses Coulee and was letting gravity pull it toward the Cascades. Soon, it would take its evening dip into the Pacific to cool off for the night, and then Moses Coulee would become a different thing altogether.” Such writing is reminiscent of Dunn’s other work, and fans of his novel Radio Free Olympia (2023) will delight in this return to form. This novel arrives at an interesting time in the American cultural climate; while some readers may have a hard time finding the levity in any discussion of “freedom” or American history, Dunn writes with enough heart and a sufficiently deft hand to wrangle the material with class and self-awareness.
A fun romp through the modern American West buttressed by earnest humor and a dash of history.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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