Review: Squirrel Days by Dustin Costa ★★★★
Squirrel Days by Dustin Costa is the hard-to-classify but always-entertaining satire about the so-called US drug war. Renegade disc jockey insults the wrong people on the radio and flees to the marijuana capital of Northern California with his one-legged girlfriend, Juanita. There they find refuge with a wide variety of eccentric characters, each more insane than the last: wizards, an alien, a mad scientist, among others. Harnessing a powerful quantum weapon, this group of misfits thinks they have what it takes to defeat a bloodthirsty drug cartel.
The novel is madcap at times, hardboiled at others, and then absurdist sci-fi […]
Weeping Water by JT Ruby is an epic novel about cryonic suspension – freezing something with life-threatening injuries in order to heal them when there are significant advances in medical technology. It follows Annie, who dies in a plane crash in the eighties, and Elliot, who dies in a car accident in the nineties, as they try to piece together their lives after being unfrozen. Spanning many generations and covering cryogenics from every angle, Weeping Water is a fast-paced and thought-provoking read.
The Test by B.A. Sherman is the riveting novel of a good cop gone bad, and the first in the Greg Dorn series. Greg Dorn is a good-guy cop working in a small town, reducing traffic accidents by 35% and generally loving every minute of his job. He’s also the victim of a tragic history: his mom and sister died in a car accident when he was young. When Dorn decides to move to the big city – Denver, Colorado – things take a turn for the worse. He sees road rage and bad behavior wherever he turns, and a […]
Elliptical: The Music of Meshell Ndegeocello by André Akinyele and Jon O’Bergh is the tribute to musician and songwriter Meshell Ndegeocello, and is purported to be the first comprehensive overview of her work. The bulk of the book is about André Akinyele’s personal experience discovering her music, while Jon O’Bergh contributes more factual information about her recording history.
If there’s chicklit, Divine Roosters and Angry Clowns by Frank Crimi should be put in the category of Dude Lit. This is especially true because the novel is reminiscent of “The Big Lebowski” and the Coen brothers at their most zany. Tarantino is in there as well. Talking about filmmakers is an appropriate starting point because this novel is distinctly cinematic. Not because it reads like a screenplay but because there’s a very entertaining movie in this book crying to get out.
