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topazriver's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
sad
slow-paced
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Adult/minor relationship, Bullying, and Child abuse
sireno8's review
3.0
I like William J. Mann's novels because they tell stories that I don't hear anywhere else or give me perspective on people or communities that I'm not familiar with. Also, he does plot very well. This one is much darker than the others I've read. It's largely about abuse (mental, physical and sexual) in families and how that spirals out into communities. There's also a lot of emotional and mental illness here and many secrets. Despite its occasional emotionality, sometime clunkiness and high quotient of personal tragedy, I was completely absorbed in it. I was thoroughly engaged in the characters and their struggles and was impressed the authors vision of the dark side of life in small town America. He does a more effective job than more renowned writers like Edmund White and Andrew Holleran because his characters are more recognizable and he's not effecting a lofty prose style. I also liked the pieces of the puzzle he left for us to assemble ourselves.
phxkevin's review
3.0
Awkward start but makes sense in the end.
This is a story about a son and his mother. We are “inside” their heads as they have flashback to other times, and frankly it’s confusing, but in the end it’s a story about growing up, for both the son and the mother, and connections are made that tie the whole thing together.
It was a really difficult read in that I didn’t care too much for either the son or the mother, they both seemed dreadful people that made a lot of bad decision. I’d read a couple of pages, then set the book aside for another time, repeating often. Somewhere around page ~200 – it started being a more interesting book.
Again, once I completed the book, I found enough interest to make the whole thing worthwhile, but the first 2/3rds was a slog
It contains several triggers: underage sex, mental illness, runaway children and child abandonment. It may or may not include a murder; it’s a mystery if it actually happened, but plays a major role. Acts occur “off screen” in the characters past and are brought up from time to time: Suicide of the boy’s father and the mothers husband, parental violence directed at children.
Would you come home, Walter? Please?" With these desperate words from the mysterious, distant mother he hasn't seen in ten years, Wally Day finds his carefully constructed world falling in on itself. For years, the handsome actor has made denial his own particular art form. But now, faced with this sudden intrusion from his past, Wally must confront the reasons he left his hometown of Brown's Mill in a cloud of anger, shame, and guilt. But Wally isn't the only one who's confronting ghosts. His mother Regina had dreams too once, dreams corrupted by fate and circumstance. With her own world unraveling, with strange, confusing memories of a murder that may or may not have occurred, she turns to the son she barely knows for help. As Wally unravels the dark side of his all-American family, he has a chance to make peace with the boy he was in order to become the man he needs to be. He is once more the 14-year-old living at Miss Aletha's house on the wrong side of town, the music of "Saturday Night Fever providing the charged, erotic soundtrack to his life. The world was on the exuberant edge of change in those days, and Wally relives the thrill of discovery, the promise of forbidden sex--"and the mistake that cost him everything.
This is a story about a son and his mother. We are “inside” their heads as they have flashback to other times, and frankly it’s confusing, but in the end it’s a story about growing up, for both the son and the mother, and connections are made that tie the whole thing together.
It was a really difficult read in that I didn’t care too much for either the son or the mother, they both seemed dreadful people that made a lot of bad decision. I’d read a couple of pages, then set the book aside for another time, repeating often. Somewhere around page ~200 – it started being a more interesting book.
Again, once I completed the book, I found enough interest to make the whole thing worthwhile, but the first 2/3rds was a slog
It contains several triggers: underage sex, mental illness, runaway children and child abandonment. It may or may not include a murder; it’s a mystery if it actually happened, but plays a major role. Acts occur “off screen” in the characters past and are brought up from time to time: Suicide of the boy’s father and the mothers husband, parental violence directed at children.
Would you come home, Walter? Please?" With these desperate words from the mysterious, distant mother he hasn't seen in ten years, Wally Day finds his carefully constructed world falling in on itself. For years, the handsome actor has made denial his own particular art form. But now, faced with this sudden intrusion from his past, Wally must confront the reasons he left his hometown of Brown's Mill in a cloud of anger, shame, and guilt. But Wally isn't the only one who's confronting ghosts. His mother Regina had dreams too once, dreams corrupted by fate and circumstance. With her own world unraveling, with strange, confusing memories of a murder that may or may not have occurred, she turns to the son she barely knows for help. As Wally unravels the dark side of his all-American family, he has a chance to make peace with the boy he was in order to become the man he needs to be. He is once more the 14-year-old living at Miss Aletha's house on the wrong side of town, the music of "Saturday Night Fever providing the charged, erotic soundtrack to his life. The world was on the exuberant edge of change in those days, and Wally relives the thrill of discovery, the promise of forbidden sex--"and the mistake that cost him everything.
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