DIRT ROAD HOME, charming young-adult/coming-of-age novel I expected not to like but did

DIRT ROAD HOME
ALEXANDER NADER
Winding Road Stories (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$2.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: City kid Logan Davis is about to find the family he never knew he was missing at the end of a country road.

Logan has no interest in leaving Detroit. But when his impulsive mother shoves him and his brother, Dex. in the back of her old Buick to chase her newest husband in Tennessee, he thinks heading south will be the end of the world. A physical confrontation with a local football star on his first night in town seems to confirm his worst notions.

Prepared to encounter every stereotype in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, Logan soon discovers his new home might not be all that different. His knack for fixing up fast cars helps him fit right in with the wild and loud southern attitude. A chance encounter at a back road street race leads him directly into the path of the undeniable spirit of the south; her name is Leah.

Dirt Road Home is a novel about finding yourself and realizing that sometimes you have to travel five hundred miles away from your house to find your home.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.

My Review: My god, I hear regular readers saying under their breaths, what the hell got into this old man? TWO books you can call YA in two days...with four stars!

Yep. The publisher reached out to me on Twitter before the book came out...not all the way sure why...and said "you'll like this book." And I did, really surprising myself most of all.

Logan's a kid about to become a young man. He's got some skills at car-related mechanical work. He's got a mother who's a disaster at picking men. He's got a jock as an enemy in their new town. His just-barely-younger brother is his wing man, and his fellow gearhead. It's all gonna go just swell, ain't it, thinks annoyed frustrated Logan.

Cue the girl, please.

Leah's the kind of girl who goes to the street races. Not with someone, she goes on her own because she likes it. The best thing about this story for me was the way these two slightly weird kids felt the gravity of each others' existence. There's the key to the story being a coming of age/young adult book: they have that feeling for each other and the whole time, they don't even question it. They're each thrilled with their luck.

Then there's the man his mother dragged her boys to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, to be with. Another disaster, I though cynically. Another antagonist. Indeed not, cynics. Greg is the absolute best guy...patient, kind, accepting...that everyone in the family could have hoped to meet. He's a prince among men.

I *did* say it was aimed at young adults.

Why I liked it, though, was the economical prose wasn't at the expense of the characters being realized. It felt to me that the details Author Nader gave us were quite simple, but carefully chosen.

My phone beeps, interrupting my late-night, early-life crisis.

–and–

I'm trying to decide if it would look better if I dug a giant sleep-booger out of my eyeball or just left it and hope she doesn't notice.

I came away thinking Logan finally got something good out of the craptastic life his mother had led for them. I was glad for them all that Greg (for unknowable reasons) decided this was the woman he wanted out of the billions there are. Luck for them all, he did.

I'm surprised at how much pleasure I got from this long-afternoon's read. I hope y'all give the story a chance to beguile you, too.

NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO PANIC, follow-up to his fame-setting novel...worthy successor?

NOW IS NOT THE TIME TO PANIC
KEVIN WILSON
Ecco Press
$27.99 hardcover, available now

One of Time Magazine's 100 Must-Read Books of 2022

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: From the New York Times bestselling author of Nothing to See Here comes an exuberant, bighearted novel about two teenage misfits who spectacularly collide one fateful summer, and the art they make that changes their lives forever.

Sixteen-year-old Frankie Budge—aspiring writer, indifferent student, offbeat loner—is determined to make it through yet another sad summer in Coalfield, Tennessee, when she meets Zeke, a talented artist who has just moved into his grandmother’s unhappy house and who is as lonely and awkward as Frankie is. Romantic and creative sparks begin to fly, and when the two jointly make an unsigned poster, shot through with an enigmatic phrase, it becomes unforgettable to anyone who sees it. The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us.

The posters begin appearing everywhere, and people wonder who is behind them. Satanists, kidnappers—the rumors won’t stop, and soon the mystery has dangerous repercussions that spread far beyond the town. The art that brought Frankie and Zeke together now threatens to tear them apart.

Twenty years later, Frances Eleanor Budge—famous author, mom to a wonderful daughter, wife to a loving husband—gets a call that threatens to upend everything: a journalist named Mazzy Brower is writing a story about the Coalfield Panic of 1996. Might Frances know something about that? And will what she knows destroy the life she’s so carefully built?

A bold coming-of-age story, written with Kevin Wilson’s trademark wit and blazing prose, Now Is Not The Time to Panic is a nuanced exploration of young love, identity, and the power of art. It’s also about the secrets that haunt us—and, ultimately, what the truth will set free.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Nothing to See Here was a solid 3.5-star read for me. It was entertaining and I got a few moments of real emotional involvement. I didn't think I'd go looking for more of Author Wilson's work but the Universe had other ideas...Ecco offered me the DRC and, being game as well as greedy, I hopped on it like a hen on a junebug.

Frankie Budge is a teenaged girl with a serious boredom problem. She's a Coalfield, Tennessee, girl who's smart enough to be a novelist in training and bored enough to do anything to stave off the screaming meemees. She's got triplet brothers whose lives will clearly end in tears, prison sentences, and severe emotional damage. Her father's left his family for another woman, and her mother...cruises...she lets Frankie be her own weird self because, well, triplet boys on the way to prison require more than a single working mother actually has to give. Yay for Frankie! Then she meets Zeke, a new kid with no friends.

Zeke's dad was a horndog, too. (Is this something Author Wilson knows about from personal experience, one must ask oneself.) Zeke apparently decompensated all over the guy in the middle of his office. Well, that's what his mom says...he can't remember any of it. Oh, and this is important: He's so freaked about the whole nightmare that he's decided to rename himself "Zeke" short for his middle name, Ezekiel. He and his mom are staying in Coalfield, where she was from. And that's how the match met the gas....

Y'all remember the 1980s Satanic Panic era? All that horror, all those lives ruined...well, in her gawky attempt to connect with this boy she likes, Frankie made the error to end all errors...she showed him a Xerox machine her brothers had stolen from the high school's shed. With toner and paper and everything...and she lets Zeke fix it, using the loveliest phrase for a paper jam I've ever heard: "like the machine had done origami"...so thus begins one of the major Satanic panics moved all the way up in time to 1996.

Their use for the photocopier is to make an art project (after Frankie uses it as an excuse to cop her first-ever kiss from a boy who's never kissed a girl either) of a poster—a drawing Zeke does after she writes “The edge is a shantytown filled with gold seekers. We are fugitives, and the law is skinny with hunger for us” on a piece of paper. Then the Xerox comes into play...she comments in her narrative about them being kids from Nowheresville and never having heard of Andy Warhol so they were inventing this new thing together...and, after making a bunch of them, Frankie puts them up all over Coalfield.

Hijinks quite horribly ensue.

The inspiration of some older teens to play off this mysterious and compelling artwork, using it for their own ends, and the horrors that any powerful thing can call forth when it's anonymous and unclaimed, break the entire town. Frankie and Zeke are kids. They're way too scared to face up to the consequences (some truly terrifying) of their innocent actions. And that is where I realized I was a lot more involved with this story than I ever was with the first book of his I read. I circled back and read "On Writing Now Is Not The Time to Panic", Author Wilson's introductory story of how this book has been moving inside him for a long time. He spoke directly from his heart, revealed his genuine grief that finally summoned this book into the world after the decades of growing, and I was utterly changed. A story I'd thought was pretty good became a moving, honest act of love for a past and a life he was no longer living. And that made my pleasure multiply many-fold.

What it means to my old-man self to see someone as young as Author Wilson contend with the doomed promise of nostalgia, to confront the power of a past one can never reach but must always reach for...well, that spoke to me. That made me feel I was heard and understood by a complete stranger who couldn't pick me out in a line-up of Boomers. I am validated by this evidence of my sad, wistful knowledge of the ghost-hand of the past clutching with steel talons in someone young enough to be my child.

Then what the hell happened to that fifth star, it's fair to ask. Welllll...I'm really not sure it's fair to say, he said, glancing at the ever-present truncheons of the Spoiler Stasi. I'm not a big fan of the way the pressure to dredge up her past with Zeke, now going by his first name again, entered Frankie's life, and the things it led her to do were understandable but frankly disturbing to me. I felt she was violating boundaries for selfish reasons. It's not like she needed to do something she did the way she did it...the knowledge could've been gained less invasively...but here we are. I've only docked a quarter-star and I'm pretty sure the sales won't suffer because one no-name blogger was squicked out at some stuff that most of y'all (who never had your boundaries utterly disregarded by a woman) won't notice.

I'm still glad I read the book, you can see. I'm especially delighted by a piece of mother-daughter healing that spoke loudly to me. And you know, that is more than enough of a gift to take the slight sting of imperfection off my eyes.

UNLIKELY ANGEL, the songwriter whose performance-art career you might've heard of

UNLIKELY ANGEL: The Songs of Dolly Parton
LYDIA R. HAMESSLEY
University of Illinois Press
$14.95 ebook editions, available now
Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The creative process of a great American songwriter

Dolly Parton's success as a performer and pop culture phenomenon has overshadowed her achievements as a songwriter. But she sees herself as a songwriter first, and with good reason. Parton's compositions like "I Will Always Love You" and "Jolene" have become American standards with an impact far beyond country music.

Lydia R. Hamessley's expert analysis and Parton’s characteristically straightforward input inform this comprehensive look at the process, influences, and themes that have shaped the superstar's songwriting artistry. Hamessley reveals how Parton’s loving, hardscrabble childhood in the Smoky Mountains provided the musical language, rhythms, and memories of old-time music that resonate in so many of her songs. Hamessley further provides an understanding of how Parton combines her cultural and musical heritage with an artisan’s sense of craft and design to compose eloquent, painfully honest, and gripping songs about women's lives, poverty, heartbreak, inspiration, and love.

Filled with insights on hit songs and less familiar gems, Unlikely Angel covers the full arc of Dolly Parton's career and offers an unprecedented look at the creative force behind the image.

I RECEIVED THIS DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I was a teen in the 1970s, when Miss Dolly was really gaining fame. In my social circle, such as it was, country music was not the first choice of listening on the car stereo. We ran to Rick Wakeman and Electric Light Orchestra and show tunes. (Drama fag here, if you're wondering.) As I, almost alone among my friends, had much-older sisters, I'd hear things overlooked by the pop-pups. Joni Mitchell wasn't big among them, but my sister gave me her old copy of Hejira when she moved, starting a love affair with Mitchell that's lasted to this very day. Then came the day she played "I Will Always Love You" and we laughed our snobby selves silly! "She sounds like a 45 played at 78," I commented, and got an approving laugh from the older audience. But that's a beautiful song, and if one is even a little bit susceptible to sentimental love poems, it's a gripping story. It's been remade and made into a hit in every decade since its first release in 1974.

Now, I can't even imagine anyone over ten years of age, not from a place that has no electricity, will not know who Dolly Parton is. So I will spend no time explaining her. Still, on the off chance you've never heard of Miss Dolly, go here.

All done? Good. Now that I'm all the way sure that you know the basics, let's us have a come-to-Jesus about the parts of Miss Dolly you've been ignoring, were foolishly dismissive of (like me), or were unaware of. The lady acts and performs and sings. But she IS a songwriter. "I Will Always Love You", written to mark the end of her early and formative loving partnership with Porter Wagoner (man charted eighty-one singles in his life, betcha most people reading this blog never heard of him!), is in the American Songbook by virtue of it ubiquity and popularity with singers and audiences alike.

Author Lydia Hamessley is a musicologist, a scholar of Southern Appalachia's musical heritage. She is a thorough academic, and that is not bad thing because her subject here isn't the media star Dolly Parton!!! but the creative dynamo songwriter behind the entertainer. Many thousands of songs have come forth from Parton's pen. Many hundreds have been recorded by herself, and many other artists. (By the way, did y'all know Miss Dolly wrote a song called "Backwoods Barbie"?!
"Don't let these false eyelashes lead you to believe
That I'm as shallow as I look,
'cause I run true and deep"
This is the same smart businesswoman whose public persona uttered the deathless aperçu, "You'd be surprised how much it costs to look this cheap!" and variations thereon, in countless interviews.)

Oh, sorry. Anyway, Author Hamessley's text is academic in purpose and execution, so I won't lie and say it flowed past my eyes like limpid creek-water down a holler. Miss Dolly wrote an autobiography for you, if that's what you're looking for; I wasn't, and I asked for this book because I wanted to know about the creative, and also the businesswoman behind the persona.

And that is precisely what I got. Say hallelujah and bring the jubilee!

In Author Hamessley's (overlong; I did say she was an academic!) Introduction to the book, she wrote this:

Two of Dolly's comments have been foundational for my work and analyses of her songs. First, "I can't stop writing songs. That's what I mean—I am so serious. If people really knew how serious I was about my music." Second, when Dolly set out on her solo career she asserted, "I'm saying a lot more in my songs than a lot of people may know. Even the simplest of my songs, I've got really deep feelings inside of them."

The fact is that this↑↑↑right here is the beating heart of Unlikely Angel, this is the thing that you're going to get in the case studies and the anecdotes: Dolly Parton is no more "just" a simple country gal who boobed her way to the top of a killer cutthroat business than she is a cold, calculating manipulator with steely discipline and rampageous ambition. She's all that, and she's more. The producer of her first solo album, Hello, I'm Dolly, (the Broadway-based story behind this is another brick in the foundation of my love for Miss Dolly!) said of her "All the same things put together made something different this time."

So Author Hamessley set out to unravel, in nine songs, one in a chapter..."In the Good Old Days (When Times Were Bad)," "Coat of Many Colors," "My Tennessee Mountain Home," "These Old Bones," "I Will Always Love You," "Just Because I'm A Woman," "Me and Little Andy," "Light of a Clear Blue Morning, and last but not least "There'll Always Be Music"...the creative and cultural arc of a six-decade career built on entertaining others and comforting the needy, loving the good times and defying the hard ones, and generally letting her force-of-nature personality loose on a gobsmacked world. (As an aside, I'd like to suggest to readers of the book that they make a playlist of the songs each chapter focuses on. I did; I listened to the whole playlist all the way through, then put the songs on as I got to a chapter. Sometimes two or three listens during a chapter helped me really get slightly abstruse-to-me points.) It's greatly to her credit that she accomplishes as much pure-D unadulterated entertainment as she does.

What she doesn't accomplish is, I suspect, down to the fact that she's telling a story while making a point. Academia requires a point beyond just spinnin' a good yarn. It's not like she fails to identify multiple very good points in the book...woman-in-business, artist-responding-to-the-world, public/private dichotomy...but she's not humanizing them with gladsome prose. This isn't, I acknowledge, her brief in a book for Univerity of Illinois Press! But it does tend to militate against a truly casual reader's sense of value recieved justifying the pricey purchase. This is something I want to be clear about.

One of the not-emphasized truths about a career containing over 3,000 (!!) songs written is that not all of them are autobiographical. Author Hamessley doesn't bear down hard on this fact. She does, in ways subtle or oblique, make it part of the idea of a chapter. This is all to the good, in my opinion; there's nothing more absurd and prurient to me than the urge to conflate performer and performance.

Steve Buckingham, author of the Preface and long-time friend of Miss Dolly's, gets the last words because I think they say everything you need to know about Miss Dolly and about this book she so generously helped bring into the world:

Over the decades Dolly and I sometimes talked about how the "cartoon" she created (her word, not mine) often overshadowed her talent as a songwriter and musician. We always strove to put the music first. ... Make no mistake, Dolly Parton is a phenomenally gifted songwriter who neverruns out of ideas. Just ask her peers. And don't let the long fingernails fool you!

Author Hamessley, thank you for this delightful deep dive into a world-beating talent's work.