From Publishers Weekly
Lives in the aftermath of 1970s radicalism form the basis of Spiotta's follow-up to her debut,
Lightning Field. We meet Mary Whittaker as she goes underground and tests out a series of new names for herself in a motel room. Flash forward to the 21st century, where Mary, now "Caroline," is a single mother whose teenage son, Jason, seems to have inherited her restlessness. (Jason checks into the narrative via his journal entries.) Mary's partner in subversion and in bed was Bobby DeSoto, who, now closing in on 50 and going by the name of Nash, runs a leftist bookstore called Prairie Fire for his friend Henry, a troubled Vietnam vet. The unspoken affection between Henry and Nash and the many nuances of their deep friendship, beautifully rendered by Spiotta, give the book a compelling core. A young woman named Miranda becomes the improbable object of Nash's skittish affection. And when Jason begins to discover bits of his mother's past, Mary begins to resurface—with possibly disastrous results. As plot lines entangle, Spiotta tightens the narrative and shortens the chapters, which doesn't really add tension or pace. The result is a very spare set of character studies not well-enough served by the resolution. A near miss.
(Feb.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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From Booklist
Civil disobedience is intrinsic to American culture from the Boston Tea Party onward, and dissenters, especially the fugitive activists of the 1970s, fascinate novelists, including Jay Cantor and Christopher Sorrentino. Spiotta also explores the pain and paradoxes of underground lives as she empathically portrays Mary and Bobby, lovers forced apart by an antiwar action gone terribly wrong. But it is the connections and contrasts she draws between Vietnam War-era protesters and today's anticorporate activists that distinguish this incisive and haunting novel. Set in Seattle, birthplace of Microsoft and Starbucks, Spiotta's keenly observant and caustically funny tale revolves around an enigmatic woman and her teenage son who are startled to discover that they share a passion for the Beach Boys, and a quirky guy who runs an alternative bookstore and serves as anarchistic guru to teens in opposition to commercialized culture. Using the younger generation's fascination with 1970s pop culture to profound effect, Spiotta succinctly and dramatically sizes up today's chillingly cynical corporate kingdom, where resistance is medicated, appropriated, and commodified.
Donna SeamanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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