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Book Review: Lemons

July 17, 2018 By Bradley Weber

cover for lemons

The cover for Melissa Savage’s latest book, Lemons.

 

LEMONS

By Melissa Savage

Yearling, 2017

Age Range:  8 – 12 years

Grades:  3rd through 8th Grade

Readership:  All genders

***Recommended

In Lemons, author Melissa Savage blends the comedy of the fish-out-of-water story and the zaniness of Bigfoot investigation with the real emotions of characters struggling with their individual losses.

It’s 1974. The Vietnam War is over; Nixon’s quit the White House; and Lemonade Liberty Witt is being sent to live with her only surviving relative: her dead mom’s estranged father.

While Lem banks on her 5th grade teacher requesting custody of Lem so she can stay in San Francisco, Lem must deal with all the rage and sadness of losing her mother, losing her place in the world, being under the care of someone she didn’t even know existed, and of being sent to a backwoods town that happens to be the Bigfoot Capital of the World.

It’s this last item which helps Lem; her grandfather, Charlie; and Tobin, the cryptid-obsessed neighbor boy who’s father didn’t quite make it home from the war. Though Lem joins Tobin on his Bigfoot hunt because she has nothing better to do, the investigation allows them all to redirect their angers and griefs long enough to begin healing.

Ms. Savage’s prose is crisp and well-paced. For a book full of people dealing with personal loss,  Ms. Savage gives everyone’s emotions their due without overwhelming the characters, the story, or the reader. The characters consciously chose restraint in situations that—on TV, in movies, or in lesser works—would be amped-up for effect. With any luck, young readers will pick up on this and see it as a better way to handle overwhelming emotions.

Ms. Savage’s second book, The Truth About Martians hits shelves in early October.

For your copy of Lemons, and to pre-order The Truth About Martians, visit Anderson’s Bookshop or your local independently owned bookstore.

For more information about Melissa Savage, visit her website at https://melissadsavage.com/.

 

TTAM_Cover
Cover for Melissa Savage’s forthcoming book, The Truth About Martians.

Filed Under: Book Reviews, Kid's Stuff Tagged With: book reviews, Lemons, Melissa Savage

Is this Bat Country?

April 2, 2012 By Bradley Weber

It was a nightmare, getting out of L.A. . . . The desert would be bad enough all by itself. 
     Something big and batlike swooped through the tunnel of lights and was gone. He ignored its passage. Five minutes later it made a second pass, this time much closer, and he fired a magnesium flare. A black shape, perhaps forty feet across, was illuminated, and he gave it two five-second bursts from the fifty-calibers, and it fell to the ground and did not return again. 
     To the squares, this was Damnation Alley.

 

Damnation Alley is a really awful book with an impossible cult following. Published in 1969, it went on to be made into an even worse film staring George Peppard, Jan-Michael Vincent, and Jackie Earle Haley which as gained an even stronger cult following than the book.

How I acquired first-hand knowledge of these matters is a story too horrible to tell, at least right now. All will be revealed when I’ve made my millions and adoring fans hang on my every word. Meanwhile, I have to wonder if this shitty little book was in some way an influence on Hunter’s conceptualization of Bat Country and the fearful run from L.A. to L.V.

Zelazny’s novel is a post-apocalyptic version of the 1925  “Great Race of Mercy” — when 20 sled dog teams raced 1085 miles to bring diphtheria antitoxin to Nome, Alaska. This time it’s a suicide run from the nation-state of California across the nuke-ravaged, monster-filled wasteland with some Haffikine anti-serum — because they gots the plague way over in Boston.

Leading the a three-car team of recidivist goons is Hell Tanner, last of the West Cost Hell’s Angels. (Seriously. I wouldn’t make that up.)  Tanner is a hard core sonofabitch who’s been in jail for any number of dirty deeds — including smuggling candy to the Mormons. The carrot for Tanner and the rest of the screw heads to make the trip is that they get full pardons for their crimes. . . .

This plot synopsis is somewhat beside my point.

Like with B. Traven’s Death Ship, John Bainbridge’s Super-Americans and a few other texts I’ve run across, Damnation Alley feels like it might have suggested something to Hunter and in some way informed his writing.

Everybody knows about the influence of Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Donlevy on the good doctor’s work. But Hunter’s approach to reading seems to have been , in the best sense, a shotgun affair. There is a list of books in a 2006 Harper’s article by William Kennedy (that I can’t link to because you need to subscribe in order to view it), that only hints at the breadth and depth of Thompson’s literary tastes.  One might be inclined to think Hunter was indiscriminate, reading at random, but that doesn’t seem to fit. Omnivorous, certainly — with a purpose.

Traven’s writing in Death Ship has amazing rhythms and a personal, wrong guy/wrong place/wrong time sensibility mirrored in some of Hunter’s best work; Super-Americans is about Texas being the last bastion of the American Dream; Damnation Alley describes the desolation, danger, gila monsters, and high desert weirdness between Barstow and Vegas.

What else is out there he might have read and pulled from?

It’s time to finish Gonzo Republic to see if Stephenson’s worthy examination of Thompson’s writing and themes includes any intertextual analysis of the canon.

Filed Under: Book Reviews, Fear & Loathing, Movies, Writing Tagged With: Bat Country, Damnation Alley, Roger Zelazny

MysteriousPress.com

October 27, 2011 By Bradley Weber

This just in from bookstore proprietor, publisher, and editor extraordinaire, Otto Penzler:

 I’m pretty jazzed right now. After two years of hard and often frustrating work, the website of my electronic publishing company is up and running. Click this link — http://mysteriouspress.com/  — if you’d like to see it and the terrific array of books and authors we’re offering. It’s the first day, so only about 40 books are up, but we’ll be adding hundreds more over the next few months.
Yours sincerely, Otto

For all you mystery fans with e-readers and i-Pads, Otto’s site has enough great titles to keep you busy for a good long while. And like he says, more are on the way.

Don’t forget: X-mas is coming on fast, and e-readers are cheap. Buy one, load it with mysteries, and give it to a friend. They’ll thank you.

 

Filed Under: Book Reviews, Book Reviews, JMS Labs Tagged With: e-reader, iPad, Mysterious Press, mysteriouspress.com, Otto Penzler

Steadman’s Children’s Book Art

December 2, 2010 By Bradley Weber

Both of these books are long overdue. Not from publishers, from the library. They were checked out three weeks ago, read within days and have been sitting on my desk since then. So instead of being paid to review these, I’m now paying twenty-five cents a day per book. It’s tough that gold, not irony, is coin of the realm otherwise I’d be able to afford that flying pony Kidzilla wants for xmas.

There is no reason to spend much time on the texts. The Big Red Squirrel and the Little Rhinoceros was written by a Swiss publisher and is, despite its hyperbolic jacket text, pure crap. The Mildenhall Treasure is some decent reporting by Roald Dahl about a plowman’s January 1942 discovery of ‘the greatest treasure ever found on the British Isles.” The dwelling point here is Steadman’s styles in children’s book illustration separated by 35 years of craft and the effects of his being the birthing partner of Gonzo Journalism.

Published in 1999, The Mildenhall Treasure’s two–dozen illustrations are typical of Steadman’s well known style: thoughtful composition balanced with loose, seemingly frenetic, brushwork. His art here is a meatier, amped-up and menacing version of the skewed whimsy Quentin Blake did for most of Dahl’s other children’s books. For this story, Steadman’s style, not Blake’s, is the better fit.  Steadman’s merciless portrayal of people reveales their deeper natures; his environmental palate is dark, muddy, and cold –– nicely mirroring the actual dirt of a winter farm and the moral grime of that greedy bastard, Sydney Ford.

The one thing Steadman’s style fails to showcase is the treasure’s true value — the fine craftsmanship of each of the recovered pieces. Images of the treasure seem to be cut outs from a museum catalog or enlarged photocopies gouached over to less-than-stellar effect. Random House targeted this book for kids. Younger readers will likely have a hard time figuring out what Steadman’s pictures of the treasure are supposed to depict.

Why Steadman didn’t use actual photos or execute clear and representative drawings, I don’t know. There is likely some bullshit copyright/intellectual property reason the British Museum wouldn’t clear images of the treasure for this book. Too bad. Those photos with Steadman’s paintings and Dahl’s text would have been a powerful combination.

The same cannot be said for The Big Red Squirrel. Steadman’s art is the only rationale this boring, hollow, let’s-all-get-along tale is back in print after 45 years.

This not so much a picture book –– where the words and images work together to create greater meaning –– as an illustrated story. The text spells everything out, leaving the artist to decorate the white space around the words. Ralph seems to have done the best he could with what he’d been given, managing to deliver better art than the story deserved.

Gouaches and inks were Ralph’s mediums for this book, too. And while there is a certain looseness, the paintings are still well-mannered. Few people familiar with his Gonzo and post-Gonzo styles would be able to pick these out of a line-up of his work.  The crocodile and frog are the most memorable and many of the background animals are fun and eye-catching. The rest of the animals and many of the environments are muddy, uninspired and forgettable. Combine that with the puerile narrative and The Big Red Squirrel becomes less a curiosity than a boring artifact.

Filed Under: Art, Book Reviews, Fear & Loathing, JMS Labs, Kid's Stuff Tagged With: children's books, Gonzo art, Mildenhall Treasure, Ralph Steadman, Roald Dahl, Steadman

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