ONLY LOVE CAN BREAK YOUR HEART :: Ed Tarkington

"Love can make people do terrible things."

Small-town Virginia 1977, a small enclave seemingly insulated from the general madness of the world. This is where narrator Richard "Rocky" Askew, almost eight, lives with his mother, father (the Old Man), and half-brother Paul, sixteen. Rocky, the "good kid," is "excessively governed and supervised,...imprisoned by his mother's anxieties" due to "what had become or appeared to be becoming of Paul."

By real world standards, Paul feels far from a bad kid, but in Spencerville, driving your Chevy Nova around town while smoking cigarettes, wearing your hair long, and listening to loud rock music is what constitutes a "bad kid" and that's how Paul is labeled. He starts out as a stellar big brother to Rocky, teaching Rocky about the greats of rock and roll and often letting him tag along with Paul and his girlfriend Leigh, daughter of a prominent local judge (none too happy about his top student-athlete daughter's relationship with a no-good like Paul Askew).

When left by the Old Man to bear a family burden alone, it's the last straw for Paul. Full of vengeance and misguided empathy, Paul undertakes a course of action that narrowly eludes disaster. The next day, Paul and Leigh run off, leaving devastation in their wake.

The lives of the Askews are also entwined with those of the Culvers, Brad and Jane, who live on the neighboring Twin Oaks property, a larger, historical parcel the Old Man was, in his mind, not good enough to buy when he tried. In the words of Rocky, "[the Culvers'] hands have been on every bad thing that's happened" to his family.

The troubled dynamic of the two families is set off on a new, fateful course when, eight years following the disappearance of Paul and Leigh, Rocky takes on work at the Culver stables, leading to a relationship with their daughter Patricia, many years Rocky's senior:

To the few people I've told about Patricia over the years, I have described her as a mysterious older woman who, through chance and circumstance, took me to bed and stole my innocence. To men, I would treat the whole experience as a naughty little conquest. To women, I would relate it as a dark secret that had marked me with a lingering, melancholy vulnerability. The truth was something more complicated.

The drama set up by Paul and Leigh's disappearance, Rocky and Patricia's "romance," and the Old Man's dealings with Brad Culver was palpable and I devoured and adored the first half of Only Love Can Break Your Heart. The characters and their relationships were engrossing and I was drawn into their world and issues very quickly; I simply didn't want to put the book down. My heart ached for Rocky, I felt for Paul but also wanted to smack him upside the head, same with the Old Man. The family dynamics were compelling, often sad, and always very human.

Tarkington's writing is beautiful and I flagged many passages throughout, but the second half of the story felt a bit loose and amorphous to me. A mystery is thrown into the last quarter and solved with a bit of a whimper, secondary characters appear and then seem to have trouble finding a place, and the crescendo really never crescendoed. I went from knowing I had to have a copy of Only Love for my shelf to the lesser but still positive vibe of being glad I'd found the book and this author. No doubt I will read Ed Tarkington's next offering.

STREET SENSE: Lovely and engaging writing, unique characters, and intriguing relationships and family dynamics highlight this tale of family, love, and tragedy. While the story flagged for me in the second half, I still recommend the book to those readers who aren't sticklers for a watertight plot over character and writing.

A FAVORITE PASSAGE: We must all recall the incomprehensible spite of the schoolyard bully: The random selectivity of his malice, the helpless acquiescence of his prey. Perhaps worse of all, the pathetic betrayal of the victim's so-called friends, who stand aside or perhaps even laugh and jeer, loyalty being a far less powerful instinct than self-preservation. Instead of forming a line of defense, they part and flee, like the herd of wildebeests on Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, blithely trotting away as the lion gorges on the the entrails of some unfortunate straggler while Marlin Perkins voices airy platitudes about the circle of life.

COVER NERD SAYS:  By now it should come as no surprise that the cover of Only Love is what initially caught my eye while I was perusing the NetGalley shelves. I had not heard of the book or Ed Tarkington when I clicked to read the summary based solely on the cover image. The title and fonts gave me the feeling I might like what was inside. In fact, even though I'm not a huge fan of the font used for the author's name, it evoked something lighter and humorous that made me curious as to how those elements might co-exist. Strangely, this is the second 2016 title to switch covers on me. When I started reading, the cover didn't speak to me as much as it did when I first saw it. A quick Google search revealed the initial cover below, which I like much more than the blue one. I think the brown fits much better and the author font presents much better in black. Overall, well done.

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THE BEAUTIFUL BUREAUCRAT :: Helen Phillips

"'Perhaps you will find this work tedious,' The Person with Bad Breath said. 'It is also highly confidential. Not to be discussed with anyone at all. Including him.' The 'him' added almost aggressively."

I like the way Helen Phillips thinks. She's an out-of-the-box writer and I appreciate that, whether a particular book hits on all cylinders for me or not. With The Beautiful Bureaucrat, Phillips has written a mystery within a mystery, shrouded in mystery.

Joseph and Josephine have moved from "the hinterland" ("hint of land, the term they used to dismiss their birthplaces, that endless suburban non-ness") to a big city. It felt like New York to me, but who knows? Part of the enigma enveloping The Beautiful Bureaucrat is that the reader doesn't really know where or when the book is set. It felt like dystopian New York to me, but I could be so far off base I'll get picked off from center field.

Our intrepid couple are also broke and a bit demoralized, having been evicted from their apartment, left sitting on the curb with their possessions. Josephine finds a mystery job after meeting with The Person with Bad Breath (who also lacks a definable face), entering information into a, you guessed it, mystery Database.

Josephine's curiosity can't be dampened, she "carried the Database around inside her; it floated in her brain like a net for catching and killing any glistening idea that came along." Her interest is also piqued by her workplace itself, full of locked doors, inaccessible floors, and other weirdness:

She noticed a dark smudge on the pinkish ill-colored wall. Her fingers fell away from the keyboard, reached over to touch it. s her gaze moved outward from the smudge, she realized it wasn't just years of tack holes and tape that made these walls look so tired. These were scratches, smears, shadowy fingerprints, the echoes of hands.

Her co-workers, or seeming lack thereof, are also shrouded in mystery, with one larger-than-life exception, Trishiffany (whose parents couldn't decide between Trisha and Tiffany):

When she finally slid the lock and opened the stall door, Josephine was shocked to find a petite bright-blond woman who looked to be in her twenties, a bubble-gum-pink suit straining against disproportionately large breasts. It hadn't occurred to her that other young women might work here. She'd assumed, based on the handful of dark-clothed, bureaucrats she'd seen scurrying around a corner or darting into an office, that all the employees must be half dead, like The Person with Bad Breath.

Josephine is also perplexed by her personal life. As she and Joseph move from sublet to sublet, she receives cryptic notices of package delivery attempts, although no one knows where they live. Even Joseph himself, her love and rock, begins to add to the oddities of her life with some out-of-character behavior.

The reader is taken along with Josephine on her peculiar trip as she tries to figure out the meaning behind the Database. Phillips is a fun writer, making the trip a pleasant one despite the multi-layered story and some strange writing elements. This is a weird one, to be sure.

Some of that weirdness blends with the plot, some components I couldn't make fit, some fit but felt a bit forced, as if they were added to mix in some social commentary, or symbolism (pomegranates and cockroaches, anyone?), or simply to pull off a plot twist. Josephine, for example, tends to think in anagrams, many of which aren't really anagrams. Is this just a personality quirk Phillips decided to give a character, or was it solely a tool to bring about a (somewhat major) revelation to Josephine? I prefer the former, but it almost felt like the latter. The book was replete with passages such as this (when we're in Josephine's head):

The ceiling began to undulate.
Undue late.
Ulna duet.
Luau dent.
Dual tune.
Do la nu.
Duel aunt.
Laud tuna nut.
A dune lute.
"Please," Josephine begged. "Silencio!"
Ice in sol!
Lice is no!
Slice eon!

If you're like me, you won't be sure which oddities fit and which are just odd until you finish the book. It's a very fast read, and really quite engrossing. Although the main mystery isn't too difficult to decipher, there are enough questions here that you won't lack for an impetus to keep the pages turning, even if only to figure out what the hell it's all been about. In the end, I really loved the main mystery, but some of the extraneous elements missed the mark.

STREET SENSE: Part mystery, part dystopian thriller, The Beautiful Bureaucrat is an engaging read with a unique premise that defies categorization. Which, in my book, is a great thing. It's an outside-the-box read that had me wondering and curious and glued to it despite of and because of its weirdness. While I wanted to adore it, it fell a bit short of that. There's symbolism here aplenty and perhaps I missed something that would have added to the oomph, but from the perspective of the thriller element the end was a bit of a fizzle rather than a crescendo. I would have liked more of the elements to find their place in the end and wanted a bit more substance to Joseph. If you are a fan of an interesting mystery shrouded in the bizarre, this one is for you.

A FAVORITE PASSAGE (or two):  The files mocked her, their voices whispery as paper cuts.

A woman with a name like Esme Lafayette Gold had to have a more dramatic life than someone named Josephine Anne Newbury. She pictured metallic green eye shadow and satin dresses in gem hues and tragic loves, before chiding herself for falling into cliches; Esme could just as well be a first-grade teacher who always wore muted colors and went to bed at 8:30 p.m. Or maybe she was a first-grade teacher who wore metallic-green eye shadow

COVER NERD SAYS: The cover is what initially attracted me to The Beautiful Bureaucrat. Which is somewhat curious, as the artwork doesn't really (I don't think) have any relevance or meaning until you've read the book. I'm not even a fan of pomegranates. Bugs I can take or leave depending on the number of legs and biting capacity. But this cover art is truly art. It almost reminds me of one of those old rustic posters advertising milk or baking powder. I love the palette, the font, and for sure the mystery background. Well done.