Customer Reviews

Stained Glass Rain

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Boston has provided us with an uncannily accurate feel for the 60s, a decade of emergence, fueled by drugs and individualized anarchy

As in his poems, Boston creates very palpable imagery that helps place the reader in the midst of the characters for a realistic journey into one of the most important decades of the century

Bruce Boston's "Stained Glass Rain" achieves something very rare: a richly layered, unsentimental evocation of a period (the 1960's counterculture movement) that is so often populated with archetype and caricature in the rearview mirror of time. It is a knowing journey through the lives of its characters that goes far beyond the surface zeitgeist of that time. Boston, who is also a remarkable poet, weaves a spell that balances clarity and delirium, intensity and peace, that can literally lift you from the pages. The four central characters, wildly disparate in personality and history, form one of those brief circles in life where you are brought strangely and vividly alive, learning more about yourself than you could have dreamed, before flaw, strain, doubt, and the inevitable subtle wounding that comes from opening up too much takes place, and the circle begins to splinter. A powerful and important book, that will challenge your mind and senses, and will reward serious reading with the deepest sense of satisfaction.

I've read various novels dealing with the Sixties, Brautigan et al, but most were West Coast oriented. Boston's novel is East Coast. Now the times and stimulation were similar, but I think the East Coast version was little darker and more intellectual. Kind of East Village vs. Haight Asbury, the former already brimming with counter culture lore and history. Boston's book is intelligently and poetically written, but is not a quick read. This is serious literature, but as others have pointed out, a more accurate snapshot of the Sixties, not to mention a very entertaining one.