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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Move over Danielle Steele!, April 7, 2000
This is the ultimate American Spring Break story. Buck and Pete, a couple of innocent boys, get educated about life while on a hitch hiking trip down old Route 66 in 1967. What a great idea and story. I love Rt 66 and anything about it. I get all romantic when I think about it. And romance? Well, the author delivers that! This is one of the sexiest books I've ever read. Chet Nichols definetely is the best writer of sensual scenes I've read lately (can you print that?). Very steamy. I like that. Plus, the story really takes you back to the 60's and gives you a taste of what that time was all about. I was a baby in Switzerland when all the events were happening in this book, but the book made me wish I was there.It made me miss America. I really enjoyed all the characters.....Eddie Lee, Avery, Mary Jane, Amy (reminds me of myself), Father O'Brien....plus there were alot of great female characters in the story. The author knows how to write about women. I like that.Besides being real sexy, this book is also very funny and it's a fast read. I was on vacation in Southern France and I read it in two days on the beach. My boy friend also read it and really enjoyed it. It turned both of us on! I think it's the best novel written about Route 66...and one of the other reviews said someting about this book being made into a movie. That is a great idea. Tell the author, Chet Nichols, that I am going to share this book with all my friends in Paris and Rome.Love to all!
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Road Novel We've Waited For, February 25, 2000
Spring Break, 1966. Florida - been there, done that. Road Trip - where? Route 66. Let's go. Buck and Pete step onto 66 in Oklahoma, and step off in a California many of us remember and long for. Music, women and a culture unsure of where the Viet Nam War would lead us, provide the guys with a Spring Break unlike anything they had previously experienced. Chet Nichols brings to life a story dedicated to leaving the path our parents would have wished on us, to explore a world the majority only dreamed of. The discovery of an idyllic life in Flagstaff, Arizona (punctuated by a redneck run-in) leads the guys to understand there is something beyond the confines of Oklahoma. (A side note - although a novel, I can assure you Josh and Maggie are alive and well, and their Granddaughters are every bit as wild as their mothers - Flagstaff lives on!). The beach, and the grandeur of the Pacific, leads to the world of sex, drugs and rock-n-roll - a time many of us remember with fondness, and Chet brings it all back in vividly written scenes that make an "old guy" long for a return to those times. The Last Riders on Route 66 is the Route 66 novel we've waited for. Guidebooks, histories, maps and, even a murder mystery have explored the Mother Road, but Chet Nichols takes us on a Road Trip that will stir the emotions of those who lived through the excitement of the 60's only to land in the boredom of the 90's and the new millineum. Well, researched (with only a couple of minor errors about the road), and written in a style that virtually demands you keep reading, The Last Riders of Route 66 is a book for every Roadie who lived through the sixties. Were Buck and Pete truly the last riders of Route 66? The answer is, sadly, yes, they may have been. The rest of us can only search the road and bring with us our memories of those Road Trips from years gone by - but through the pages of Chet Nichols novel we are allowed to share in one of the great Road Trips of all time.
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2.0 out of 5 stars
A missed opportunity, December 9, 2001
Chet Nichols has some good ideas here -- it's hard to resist a story of two college chums hitchhiking across Route 66 during the beginning of the peace movement and "free love" era (apparently a lot of free love, at that) during the 1960s. The background of growing upheaval and social change on America's most famous road provides for a lot of literary opportunities.The book works fairly well in getting a sense of traveling on that road -- an valuable service, as many of the attractions that made Route 66 so fun and adventuresome disappeared after the interstates. Trouble is, Nichols' story of the two hitchhikers is marred by a lack of character development. I wanted to know more about what made the characters tick, their backgrounds, what motivated them and their actions, but was left wanting. Secondly, the book is poorly edited, with inappropriate capitalizations, misspellings and misplaced punctuation that distract the reader. Was someone asleep at the publishing house while proofing the manuscript? A few errors in several hundred pages I will forgive, but not dozens and dozens of them. Maybe someday a great novel will be written about Route 66 and all its contradictions, landscapes, people and pop culture contributions. This one isn't it.
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