3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A gripping read, with a touch of the poet in the writing, April 27, 2004
By A Customer
This review is from: Virginia Lovers (Hardcover)
Michael Parker has always written lyrically and poetically. But in this novel his storytelling acumen and talent have risen to equal heights with his talent for imagery and character description. I loved this book! This is not a "Southern novel"; this is a story of family, tragedy and redemption, passages and human character, which happens to be set in a small town in the south. This novel should appeal to anyone who loves a good story but also understands the importance of family and the roles we play in family. Read this book!
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
He lived valiantly and was loved back with a simple honesty, April 29, 2005
This review is from: Virginia Lovers (Hardcover)
Author Michael Parker certainly knows teenage angst. He also knows about small town America and how teenagers who are somehow different can so often be cruelly ostracized and made to feel like outcasts. In his world, young men are often angst-ridden, and troubled, stumbling through life shouldering enormous problems with no resolution in sight. Even the families depicted in his novels go through their days in a miasma of missed communication.
In his latest, Virginia Lovers, it is 1975 and the Edgecombe family is living in Trent, North Carolina. They're just trying to get along and survive each day without arguing. Over the years, brothers Pete and Daniel have steadily grown apart. Now more like acquaintances than actual brothers, Pete has developed a set of unruly, disruptive buddies and spends his time drinking with them, rolling joints, being cool, and fantasizing about the Rolling Stones. He's a smart, brilliant boy, but Thomas, his concerned father, is beginning to worry, not just about the people he's hanging out with - "the riffraff demimonde," but also about his recent derelict behaviour.
Daniel, on the other hand, is a star student and had been working hard in the hope of obtaining the prestigious Carmichael Scholarship that will finally get him out of this tin pot, hick town. Neither concerned nor particularly interested in what his younger brother says or does, Daniel throws himself into his studies with an intellectual rigor and tries hard to be a valued member of the school football team, even though he's only playing because it will make him look better in the eyes of the Carmichael judges.
Thomas, their morally upright father, runs Trent's local newspaper. A left of center journalist, and a closeted champion of civil rights, Thomas has spent most of his professional life dedicated to presenting honest, non-partisan news, but he constantly has to battle the more conservative forces who in the past have been more easily offended by his more liberal views. His role as "a purveyor of truth in the community" and unapologetic defense of the blacks and Jews has often comes at a price in the form of cancelled subscriptions and angry letters. Thomas seeks solace from Caroline, allowing her "shoulder the business of domesticity" but it doesn't make his job of raising two boys and running the town's paper any easier.
When Brandon Piece, an effeminate gay teenager is brutally murdered in his parents' bedroom following an alcohol soaked high-school keg party, all eyes turn to Pete and Daniel. Both were familiar with the boy - Pete through school and Daniel as a part-time friend. Brandon was picked on and vilified by almost everyone in the community, and the discovery that Pete's best friend Lee Tysinger was not just having an affair with Brandon but probably murdered him, shocks Pete and Daniel to the core.
Scared of what will happen to them if they testify, the boys hit the road in their '68 Falcon, ending up in Washington, where Daniel gets a taste of life in the big city, and where Pete tries to emotionally reconnect with his closeted gay brother. On the road with the windows open and the joints passing between them, the brothers begin to realize how alike they actually are. Leaving Trent however, makes them chief suspects in Brandon's murder.
So much of Pete's life has taken place outside his body, he's dragged through the hallways of school and out of cars of people he had nothing at all to say to and thought way beneath him. So much of his day is spent floating, far above the parking lots of Laundromats and suburban woods. Thomas questions his own "put-uponess," the lack of spontaneity in his life, all the ways in which a world had tramped him down. And Daniel, just coming out as gay, thinks of the torture of making false claims to the world; he wants so desperately to get away from Trent and his few friends and even his family.
Parker uses beautiful and measured prose to effectively evoke the complex emotional landscape of these three very different men. He also excels at describing the wasted backdrop of a small town where the only entertainment for the young is the Glam Rock-A-Rama, a Laundromat frequented by "washed out young mothers with too many kids and a wretched enough trailer life." Imbued with a kind of thrilleresque pacing, Virginia Lovers is part taught murder mystery and part curiously affecting road novel. It is the clever combination of these two genres that make this story such a riveting, absorbing, and deeply satisfying read. Mike Leonard April 05.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What lack of communication between parents and teens can do., April 13, 2005
This review is from: Virginia Lovers (Hardcover)
I stumbled across this one on Amazon, described as "an arresting story of brotherhood and betrayal, deceit and desire, set against the backdrop of a country embroiled by social change." Such recaps usually make me run the other way, but the basic underlying story ... the mysterious death of a gay teen ... sparked my interest.
In "Virginia Lovers," Parker presents a very powerful dramatic tale about the emotional distance between parents and teens, even in settings like small town Trent, North Carolina, which parents might think is an ideal atmosphere in which to grow up. Thomas is the owner of the town's weekly newspaper, and deeply involved in his work to the exclusion of real communication with his wife, Caroline, and their two teenage sons. Of the two, Thomas is really concerned only about younger Pete, who seems to have no ambition and spends his daze in a pot-induced haze. His older son, Daniel, is the quiet straight-A student who recently went out for the school's football team, to present a well-rounded image for the prestigious scholarship he has a good chance at snagging. The report of the death of the gay teen, an acquaintance of both boys, eventually points back on possible involvement by one or both of them, which joins them in an unlikely alliance to leave town and avoid the questions they would rather not have to answer. Can't tell much more about it without revealing several key plot twists, but this is a book worth reading. I give it five stars out of five.
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