An often intriguing and emotional look at lives on and off the road.
Roadies take a break from touring to rethink their lives in Black’s novel.
The people who work for rock star Sadie Estrada are like family, for good or ill. Among them are Alex, the tour electrician, and Lily, Sadie’s long-suffering personal assistant. Alex loves her job, but when she discovers that she’s pregnant, she quits to settle down with her boyfriend, Connor. He feels panicky about the baby, as he already has a grown daughter whose life he’s not much involved with. Then Alex miscarries, and she decides to return to tour life—although some of the joy is gone now that she no longer has seniority. During a concert in Italy, part of the rig falls and injures Sadie, and the crew blames Alex even though she knows she had nothing to do with it. The four women roadies on the tour—Alex, Lily, and two other stagehands—decide to rent a house in Tuscany for a vacation while the tour is stalled, and they bond on their trip. Lily is fed up with the abuse she gets from Sadie; Alex talks about her miscarriage and how painful it was. The pair think about staying in Italy, but their lives manage to catch up with them. Seeing the world of rock performance through the eyes of the roadies takes some of the glam away—they work hard, stay in bad hotels, and travel so much they can’t keep track of where they are, as noted in the title. This aspect of the novel is compelling, as most novels about rock bands follow around the musicians and not the behind-the-scenes crew. But although the plot moves quickly, it feels more like a mere series of events than an arc, and the ending leaves a few things unresolved. Still, Black does a nice job of describing the Tuscany setting, as when the vacationing women reach their destination in a remote village: “The rental house sat two hundred feet beyond a tall stone wall and looked like a place where even the most tightly wound show tech could rest.”
An often intriguing and emotional look at lives on and off the road.Pub Date: May 31, 2021
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 236
Publisher: TouchPoint Press
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.
Atwood goes back to Gilead.
The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), consistently regarded as a masterpiece of 20th-century literature, has gained new attention in recent years with the success of the Hulu series as well as fresh appreciation from readers who feel like this story has new relevance in America’s current political climate. Atwood herself has spoken about how news headlines have made her dystopian fiction seem eerily plausible, and it’s not difficult to imagine her wanting to revisit Gilead as the TV show has sped past where her narrative ended. Like the novel that preceded it, this sequel is presented as found documents—first-person accounts of life inside a misogynistic theocracy from three informants. There is Agnes Jemima, a girl who rejects the marriage her family arranges for her but still has faith in God and Gilead. There’s Daisy, who learns on her 16th birthday that her whole life has been a lie. And there's Aunt Lydia, the woman responsible for turning women into Handmaids. This approach gives readers insight into different aspects of life inside and outside Gilead, but it also leads to a book that sometimes feels overstuffed. The Handmaid’s Tale combined exquisite lyricism with a powerful sense of urgency, as if a thoughtful, perceptive woman was racing against time to give witness to her experience. That narrator hinted at more than she said; Atwood seemed to trust readers to fill in the gaps. This dynamic created an atmosphere of intimacy. However curious we might be about Gilead and the resistance operating outside that country, what we learn here is that what Atwood left unsaid in the first novel generated more horror and outrage than explicit detail can. And the more we get to know Agnes, Daisy, and Aunt Lydia, the less convincing they become. It’s hard, of course, to compete with a beloved classic, so maybe the best way to read this new book is to forget about The Handmaid’s Tale and enjoy it as an artful feminist thriller.
Suspenseful, full of incident, and not obviously necessary.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-385-54378-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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