Customer Reviews

The Motel of the Stars: A Novel (Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature)

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Karen McElmurry has written a book to touch the soul. When a man is in search of himself the road is a long and hard one to travel. Karen takes us down that road with writing to rival any other author of our time. This one is an award winning book.

I was first introduced to Karen McElmurray almost three years ago at a writers'conference in West Virginia, during which she was promoting her memoir, Surrendered Child. The excerpt she read described her honeymoon at Mammoth Cave soon after her marriage to a teen sweetheart, a meditation on her coming motherhood within the chilled bowels of the ground. I was struck by the cold, stark quality of the scene I imagined as she read, the watershed moments of adulthood compressed into months. When she finished reading, the room was silent, and I went home with the image of the wedding photo she described in my head, the Cat Stevens record that dropped and broke.

The rest of McElmurray's work is filled with the same stark quality that made this scene, and the rest of the memoir, stick with me long after I read it, and this latest book is no exception. The late '90s new age culture that serves as its backdrop is a far cry from the small Kentucky community of Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, but the characters, each tormented and isolated by his or her own grief, are vividly rendered and memorable. As Jason continues his odyssey toward reclaiming his lost son Sam, amidst the apocalyptic clamor of the Harmonic Convergence and Lory toward a reclamation of herself after a troubled childhood that becomes a troubled adulthood, McElmurray demonstrates powerfully the ways the mutual ache over the loss of a person can bind two people, how finding Jason's son's lover allows him to get back a part of the boy he lost. The way McElmurray carefully weaves together the characters' memories, moving deftly from past to the present of the narrative, allows us to see the scope of their lives, the ways Sam's choices in life continue to haunt his loved ones long after his death.

This is a beautiful book. Those who enjoyed Surrendered Child and Strange Birds will find it among the finest writing of her three books; those who have yet to discover her writing will find themselves seeking out the rest of her body of work. Highly recommended!

I finished MOTEL OF THE STARS last night and so enjoyed reading it. I especially like the way everything moves sort of grudgingly, weirdly, but inexorably toward the moving climactic scene on top of Grandfather Mountain. The book takes a hard look at all things New Age, but things do, finally, sort of align in an unsentimental, well-lit way. So much intense writing about light and lightening and attempts at enlightenment in this book. This is a uniquely powerful voice.

In The Motel of the Stars, Karen McElmurray takes us on a night journey in which stars light our way, sparking the sky and illuminating the paths we follow in our search for deeper awareness and understanding of what it means to be human and what it means to love. Each character in the novel is on a pilgrimage through sacred places of the earth and the heart. It is a harmonic convergence of yearning souls, despair and faith, and flashes of light -- that we could call love -- and that reveal doors and gateways we hadn't seen before. Language itself becomes the guiding force, each word a star that leads us closer to truth. Gorgeously written and haunting, The Motel of the Stars is a book you will want to linger over ... and visit again and again.

The Motel of the Stars, Karen McElmurray's new novel, is a lyrical, evocative, non-sensationalized exploration of grief and desire. Her vividly-portrayed characters, who manifest strengths and weaknesses, are so real and engaging that you'll feel as if you've known them intimately and forever. When healing and redemption do occur for these characters, they do so in ways that are deeply felt, authentic, and genuinely earned. I've read all of Karen McElmurray's books, and I hereby declare her an official literary treasure.
-- Janice Eidus, author, The War of the Rosens

I was fortunate enough to pick up my copy of `Motel of the Stars' at AWP in Chicago and have it signed by the author herself and spent the next couple of weeks reading it in pieces, too haunted by its sadness to give it the `straight through'. This is a book that begs to be read slowly. Like the bottomless well of Iron Butterfly's eleven minute version of `Inagaddadavida', it works best when you allow yourself to flow with its mood rather than eating it all at once, radio-edit style.

McElmurray's wordplay takes complete advantage of its melodious tone, weaving it throughout the story's plotline, traveling in and out of time and space as Jason Sanderson and Lory Llewellyn both struggle with the death of a mutual loved one. The author uses definitions to introduce each chapter, evoking a sense of astronomy with words like `black hole' and `vortex'. These words become the knot in the author's thread, anchoring both characters drawn by their memories of Sam Sanderson's life to the celebration of the Harmonic Convergence, and the inevitable converging of their separate lives.

In `Motel of the Stars', author Karen McElmurray creates a ghost story made all the more eerie by its absence of the supernatural. Although there is a supernatural aura about memories becoming so much more potent, to a point of debilitating its central characters, as the day of the planets alignment draws nearer, this is not the author's focus and she wisely leaves out any supernatural context. Rather, like a Flannery O'Connor story, fantastic elements are replaced by real world messengers.

Micky, for instance, is a child who may or may not be the nephew of a woman that loans a room to Sanderson for the night. He stands in a room full of discarded baby dolls and admits that he wants nothing more than to leave his benefactress, Goldie. We get the sense that Micky is one of Goldie's dolls, missing pieces and partially abandoned by her, even though she has all intentions of "fixing them up, one at a time, some of these days."


This is one of McElmurray's frequent dreamlike realities (or reality-like dreams) and is mirrored by Jason's own frequent memories of his own son who has been dead for ten years and who he has still refused to let go of, even after it leads to a split with his current wife, Rosa. `Motel of the Stars' is filled with these kinds of living ghosts, each one cascading perfectly into the next until the colliding of worlds at the end.

One can make arguments for the role that destiny plays in the story, but the author avoids taking any concrete position in favor of allowing the reader to drift in and out of the question. The worlds of Lory and Jason echo this sentiment; Jason is grounded in the reality of his occupation, wife, and home while Lory remains caught in the dream world, trapped in her hotel room for a decade after her lover's passing. Sam is the only link between them, and he remains an ever changing memory.


The result is a staggering view, like fireworks in slow-motion, of how these two unstable worlds slowly move into alignment through both the chance movement of the cosmos and the particular choices that each character makes. `Motel of the Stars' is as grand in scope as it is intricately delicate, and floats between rift after rift after rift like ripples on water, sparks from a radial saw, or the eternal expansion of the universe.

Though Lori and Sanderson have both lost Sam and become caught up in grief, this novel goes beyond the grief and creates characters complete with rich pasts and current lives. Not only characters, but also the essence of places such as Nepal and Grandfather Mountain are captured, making it easy to sink into the story. The prose is entracing, and the ripples of Harmonic Convergence (the actual event and the ideas of love and unity) throughout the novel are simply beautiful.

McElmurray's second novel and third book set in Inez, KY, is as evocative and lovely in language as her previous novel and memoir. The characters will haunt you long after you've finished reading the story; the dialogue is memorable, and McElmurray's signature style of combining/fusing reality and fantasy, pain and joy, suffering and redemption will not disapoint. I really loved this book!

McElmurray has a poet's gift for capturing fleeting images and the evanescent moments between people. The Motel of the Stars is a story of grief transformed into spiritual quest, and McElmurray allows us to feel what it is to live through that process, as hope slowly and imperfectly emerges through a haze of despair. Her portrait of Sanderson, a man mourning losses that he can barely comprehend, is especially powerful.

This book revolves around the concept of the harmonic convergence between the planets and stars to meld a story about despairity and faith. We get glimpses into the depths of two aching souls, looking for escape through love and acceptance. Jason Sanderson and Lory Llewellyn are both grieving the ten year loss of Sam - Jason for his son and Lory for her lover. Their grief could be anyone's grief and McElmurray openly paints the story through the wounds of loss and sadness.

But we not only get the all-encompassing grief, McElmurray teases us with memories of the past and give us characters we can believe in. Jason and Lory maybe flawed people with a common grief, but they are unique individuals you will continue to think about long after you close the last page of the book. These are characters you will want to revisit again.

I was first introduced to Karen McElmurray by my friend and writing mentor, Tony Sexton, after he attended one of her writing workshops. McElmurray demonstrates the powerful way a mutual loss of a loved one can bind two totally different people together. She has a uniquely powerful voice and I look forward to reading more of her work in the future.

The book was the Linda Bruckheimer Series in Fiction 2007 winner from Sarabande Press.