Customer Reviews

A Loser's Serenade

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...it would be kind of like this one. A Loser's Serenade offers a gritty tale of the depths that the heat of youth and love can drive people to. D. Allan Kerr wrings the blue collar for all its dirty poetry, celebrating the American underside for what it is - a collection of lost souls trying to write a happy ending to their own story. Think Kerouac without the road. If you like writers who call it as they see it and stories that probe the tangled web of our emotions without the romance novel sugar coating, this book is for you.

A Loser's Serenade does for literature what James Dean and Marlon Brando did for the movies in its overly realistic depiction of American life. D. Allen Kerr writes the story of the beautiful loser coming to terms with first-love in the cynical early 1990s, in a raw but lyrical style. Shep is the hopeless romantic born into the drug and drunk-infested Pit of quaint New England. He prefers Roy Orbison to his own generation's music, and wears the tattoo "Only the Strong Survive." But he is doomed to play the fool to a woman, despite the warnings of modern-day philosopher and drug-dealer Joe Acid. "Promise me you won't be a sucker," Joe Acid tells Shep at one point. A Loser's Serenade brings readers seamlessly through the wranglings of the main character and his Generation Nowhere compatriots as they struggle against the violence and apathy in American culture to get somewhere, and to ultimately understand women, who Joe Acid declares are "the last of the great unsolved mysteries of the universe."

I glanced at the first page while sitting at a long stop light and ended up pulling into a parking lot to keep reading. Kerr's writing grabs you hard and pulls you into a world that most people cross the street to avoid. His characters are sharply written; I almost expected to see them squabbling on a mean back street somewhere. Doomed romantic Shep knows he's going nowhere, but it doesn't stop him for reaching for a love and a life beyond his grasp -- even as his friends and fate pull him back down. The writing is witty and rich with detail about hard-knocks people grappling with the ageless questions of love and destiny.

Loser's Serenade is about love, if you can call it that, wrapped in the dark, drug- and beer-induced life of Shep and his gang of misfits. Shep falls victim to the very thing he despises - men selling their souls for love. Dialogue is swift and real, a la author James Elroy. But watch the language. The philosophical rantings of a drug dealer weave the story together as Kerr portrays this gang known only to themselves and their small world, making you meet them whether you want to or not.

Until I picked up Kerr's novel, I hadn't been interested enough to finish a book in more than a year. The characters in "A Loser's Serenade" drew me in and held me captive until the very end. Reminds me of one of my favorites, and a classic for my generation - "The Outsiders." Excellent first work, keep 'em coming!

has some bad language but this is a very realistic book. i don't go for romantic novels anymore -- now i go for realism. i want to see more books from this writer. long live Joe Acid!