An atmospheric, eloquent depiction of teen angst and discovery in the twilight years of California’s counterculture era.
A troubled teen experiences the freedoms and dangers of 1960s California youth culture in Isaak’s coming-of-age novel.
It’s 1969, four years since Rick Leibnitz’s mother fled their Redlands, California, home, taking his younger brother and sister away to escape beatings by Rick’s father. Fifteen-year-old Rick and his father have long “discarded any pretense of trying to get along.” His father tries to forcibly cut Rick’s long hair and reveals that Rick is his “only son.” For Rick, it’s an epiphany: “I almost laughed. The way I felt about him, how could I blame her? I’d leave me too.” Later, Rick is sitting outside his house when 17-year-old Stacy Slater, one of many girls who star in his masturbatory fantasies, stumbles up to a neighbor’s door. After no one answers, Stacy and Rick go to a nearby orange grove, where he loses his virginity to her. Stacy asks Rick to stash her drugs, and he gets picked up by the cops shortly thereafter. Sent to juvenile detention, Rick refuses to rat on Stacy and again resists getting a haircut. Leo Malheur, Rick’s “tall and coal-black” probation officer, brokers his release, although Rick’s father, who has moved to nearby Yucaipa, now plans to send Rick to military school the following year. Lincoln Ellard, a charismatic classmate at Rick’s Yucaipa school, helps Rick avoid this fate. The boys get a house together, where Lincoln leads intellectual “salon” discussions and lets Rick in on his drug running operations. Rick enjoys a psychedelic summer of sex and drugs until trouble arises, leading to another jail stint and new information that inspires him to hit the road to reconnect with his mother.
The articulate and introspective narrator observes and engages in a “trippy” world reminiscent of Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero, substituting the groovy late 1960s for the go-getter 1980s. As Rick muses at the end of the novel: “There were sick people among us, just as in any other generation, and hair and clothes and attitudes and drugs for them were nothing more than disguises they had donned. What had been glorious craziness in the summer looked more like actual madness in the fall.” The book packs a lot of characters and subplots into its pages, including finely etched moments focused on Rick’s probation officer, who strives for justice, is subject to racist remarks, and is in danger of being drafted. Lincoln is a marvelously drawn flawed-prophet figure who ultimately realizes he’s been “dangerously naïve.” The narrative very effectively captures a male teen’s sex-on-the-brain obsession with girls yet also fleshes out its female characters with thoughts and problems of their own. A particularly memorable sequence concerns a “pulling a train” event (group sex with one female and multiple male partners taking turns) at a party and the subsequent perspectives of both the girl involved and the girls who watched it happen.
An atmospheric, eloquent depiction of teen angst and discovery in the twilight years of California’s counterculture era.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9781958840047
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Utamatzi Inc.
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Lush, gorgeous, precise language and propulsive plotting sweep readers into a story as intelligent as it is atmospheric.
In 16th-century Madrid, a crypto-Jew with a talent for casting spells tries to steer clear of the Inquisition.
Luzia Cotado, a scullion and an orphan, has secrets to keep: “It was a game she and her mother had played, saying one thing and thinking another, the bits and pieces of Hebrew handed down like chipped plates.” Also handed down are “refranes”—proverbs—in “not quite Spanish, just as Luzia was not quite Spanish.” When Luzia sings the refranes, they take on power. “Aboltar cazal, aboltar mazal” (“A change of scene, a change of fortune”) can mend a torn gown or turn burnt bread into a perfect loaf; “Quien no risica, no rosica” (“Whoever doesn’t laugh, doesn’t bloom”) can summon a riot of foliage in the depths of winter. The Inquisition hangs over the story like Chekhov’s famous gun on the wall. When Luzia’s employer catches her using magic, the ambitions of both mistress and servant catapult her into fame and danger. A new, even more ambitious patron instructs his supernatural servant, Guillén Santángel, to train Luzia for a magical contest. Santángel, not Luzia, is the familiar of the title; he has been tricked into trading his freedom and luck to his master’s family in exchange for something he no longer craves but can’t give up. The novel comes up against an issue common in fantasy fiction: Why don’t the characters just use their magic to solve all their problems? Bardugo has clearly given it some thought, but her solutions aren’t quite convincing, especially toward the end of the book. These small faults would be harder to forgive if she weren’t such a beautiful writer. Part fairy tale, part political thriller, part romance, the novel unfolds like a winter tree bursting into unnatural bloom in response to one of Luzia’s refranes, as she and Santángel learn about power, trust, betrayal, and love.
Lush, gorgeous, precise language and propulsive plotting sweep readers into a story as intelligent as it is atmospheric.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781250884251
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
