A well-paced, gritty, and illuminating look back with an intriguing cast of characters.
Sex, drugs, changing musical vibes, and a small carved ivory snakehead propel Greenhill’s novel about an eclectic collection of struggling musicians in California during the 1970s.
Guitarist Reed Rosen drives from Los Angeles to Arroyo, where he will meet up with his friend Beau Miller, a young songwriter and singer; they have a recording session scheduled at Sierra Sound Labs. But first, he must navigate through an anti-war/Black Panther protest and the resulting police action. When he stops at a traffic light, a young Black woman opens the door, gets in the car, and sticks what feels like a gun in his side. “Drive,” she tells him. After a few blocks, he looks down and sees that the ‘gun’ is in fact a granola bar. This is how Reed meets Angie Henderson, a music arranger who will become the most important woman in his life. She rides with him to Beau’s cottage in Arroyo, located on land owned by Beau’s record producer Sunshine (AKA Solomon “Sonny” Schine), who also happens to be a major dealer of premium marijuana. The next day, at the recording session, it is Angie who saves the day after 17 lackluster takes, exercising her arranger chops to coordinate the drums and back-up musicians with the “two-AND” beat she suggested the previous night, delivering what Sunshine hopes will be Beau’s breakthrough into the country music charts. Greenhill’s nostalgic visit to the mercurial 1970s music scene in California is replete with high- and low-cultural signifiers of the period, including the social upheavals of the anti-war, anti-racist, and feminist movements, the easy availability of pot and cocaine, and lots of sex in all varieties. (A subplot involving Angie is a take-off on the Patty Hearst/Symbionese Liberation Army saga, and the little ivory snake talisman that made its way from Japan to California in Sunshine’s pocket in the early 1960s presages the later arrival of Japanese corporate involvement in the American music industry.) Most compellingly, Greenhill brings readers into the recording studios, depicting with riveting specificity the miniscule musical adjustments that are involved in producing a final product.
A well-paced, gritty, and illuminating look back with an intriguing cast of characters.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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
SEEN & HEARD
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