A bumpy collection of booze- and pill-soaked tales of desperation.
A volume of poetry and prose documents the dark lives of San Francisco’s drunks and strippers.
Life in San Francisco is a seemingly unending series of unpleasant incidents and disappointing outcomes. In one story, a bouncer must cope with the suicide of his father and his on-again, off-again relationship with a woman plagued by mental illness. In another, a man watches some amateur basketball at Kezar Stadium before barhopping and, later, drinking beer with his adult paperboy, a former basketball player. A drug dealer tries to win his wife back after his stash is discovered in her house, resulting in her losing her job and spending six days in jail. A man who has lost his job and his driver’s license rides a bicycle to get drunk at a bar, but once there, he’s forced to deal with the probing questions of an older man. The tales, often no more than a few pages, are filled with neighborhood characters and local geographies, sliding up and down Taraval Street or haunting the environs of Columbus and Green. Four of the stories follow the romantic adventures of the stripper and poet Eskimo and her locally famous brawler boyfriend, Joxer. They participate in billiard competitions, attempt to drop off poems at City Lights Bookstore, witness shootings in the local watering holes, and get arrested for crashing cars while drunk. Interspersed are poems supposedly written by Eskimo on similarly dark and mundane topics: pop songs, stains, tea, physical abuse. A sense of fatalism inhabits each piece, whether it ends in tragedy or merely the suggestion of tragedy. These are characters who will never escape their plights. In fact, many of them seem not even to want to.
Boilard’s prose deftly evokes the gritty minimalism of Thom Jones, Denis Johnson, and other bards of self-destruction and substance abuse: “The deejay introduces her as Eh, Eh, Eskimo. Joxer sits in the front row. She dances slow and sexy and sad to Johnny Cash doing his remake of Hurt by Nine Inch Nails and Joxer can’t believe it. He loves that version. It must be some kind of fate. When she finishes her routine, she sits on his lap and rubs cocaine into his upper gums with her index finger.” The poems are sparse and Beats-inspired. “Blackout” reads: “I was drunk / & / forgetting things / & falling / down & / we both / hated me / then.” They seem to exist mostly to supplement (and break up) the stories. While the tales are the main course, they feel no less derivative or overreaching. The men are mostly violent nihilists, the women mostly sexual ones. The San Francisco in which the stories are set—the eponymous “Junk City,” as one character calls it—seems to be simultaneously that of the 1950s, ’80s, and the 2010s: one in which bohemians still pay for rent bartending and dream of making enough money to “get out of this place.” While there are occasional moments of epiphany or stark imagery, such a book feels a bit outdated in 2020.
A bumpy collection of booze- and pill-soaked tales of desperation.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 225
Publisher: Livingston Press
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.
A love story about a life of second chances.
In Nassau, in the Bahamas, casino detective Vincent LaPorta grills Alfie Logan, who’d come up a winner three times in a row at the roulette table and walked away with $2 million. “How did you do it?” asks the detective. Alfie calmly denies cheating. You wired all the money to a Gianna Rule, LaPorta says. Why? To explain, Alfie produces a composition book with the words “For the Boss, to Be Read Upon My Death” written on the cover. Read this for answers, Alfie suggests, calling it a love story. His mother had passed along to him a strange trait: He can say “Twice!” and go back to a specific time and place to have a do-over. But it only works once for any particular moment, and then he must live with the new consequences. He can only do this for himself and can’t prevent anyone from dying. Alfie regularly uses his power—failing to impress a girl the first time, he finds out more about her, goes back in time, and presto! She likes him. The premise is of course not credible—LaPorta doesn’t buy it either—but it’s intriguing. Most people would probably love to go back and unsay something. The story’s focus is on Alfie’s love for Gianna and whether it’s requited, unrequited, or both. In any case, he’s obsessed with her. He’s a good man, though, an intelligent person with ordinary human failings and a solid moral compass. Albom writes in a warm, easy style that transports the reader to a world of second chances and what-ifs, where spirituality lies close to the surface but never intrudes on the story. Though a cynic will call it sappy, anyone who is sick to their core from the daily news will enjoy this escape from reality.
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780062406682
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
With captivating dialogue, angst-y characters, and a couple of steamy sex scenes, Hoover has done it again.
After being released from prison, a young woman tries to reconnect with her 5-year-old daughter despite having killed the girl’s father.
Kenna didn’t even know she was pregnant until after she was sent to prison for murdering her boyfriend, Scotty. When her baby girl, Diem, was born, she was forced to give custody to Scotty’s parents. Now that she’s been released, Kenna is intent on getting to know her daughter, but Scotty’s parents won’t give her a chance to tell them what really happened the night their son died. Instead, they file a restraining order preventing Kenna from so much as introducing herself to Diem. Handsome, self-assured Ledger, who was Scotty’s best friend, is another key adult in Diem’s life. He’s helping her grandparents raise her, and he too blames Kenna for Scotty’s death. Even so, there’s something about her that haunts him. Kenna feels the pull, too, and seems to be seeking Ledger out despite his judgmental behavior. As Ledger gets to know Kenna and acknowledges his attraction to her, he begins to wonder if maybe he and Scotty’s parents have judged her unfairly. Even so, Ledger is afraid that if he surrenders to his feelings, Scotty’s parents will kick him out of Diem’s life. As Kenna and Ledger continue to mourn for Scotty, they also grieve the future they cannot have with each other. Told alternatively from Kenna’s and Ledger’s perspectives, the story explores the myriad ways in which snap judgments based on partial information can derail people’s lives. Built on a foundation of death and grief, this story has an undercurrent of sadness. As usual, however, the author has created compelling characters who are magnetic and sympathetic enough to pull readers in. In addition to grief, the novel also deftly explores complex issues such as guilt, self-doubt, redemption, and forgiveness.
With captivating dialogue, angst-y characters, and a couple of steamy sex scenes, Hoover has done it again.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5420-2560-7
Page Count: 335
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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