NONFICTION: MEMOIR
“Sweet Judy Blue Eyes,” by Judy Collins (Crown Archetype)
For anyone who remembers the ’60s, the name Judy Collins brings back a turbulent era of drugs and free love, a time when American youth filled the streets protesting the war in Vietnam, encouraged by a troop of idealistic entertainers. Denver-bred Collins, with her haunting folk songs, was one of the movement’s sweet troubadours.
“Sweet Judy Blue Eyes” is Collins’ autobiography — her fourth, in fact — this one concentrating on her early years as a singer, played against a background of America in transition.
Collins’ career began in Boulder and Central City. In the late 1950s, she sang at Denver’s Exodus on Lincoln Street before going to New York and fame. Her father was an alcoholic, a gene she says she inherited and passed along to her son, who committed suicide. And as her career skyrocketed, so did her alcoholism, until she was drinking around the clock, destroying both her body and her voice.
Taking the title from the song her lover Stephen Stills wrote for Collins, “Sweet Judy Blue Eyes” (anybody who meets her is mesmerized by her pale blue eyes) is at times a laundry list of the singers and concerts that made up Collins’ life. She was friends with everybody in the folk world. Joan Baez, for instance, was known not only for her voice but her fashion sense, Collins writes, wearing silk “before any of the rest of us even had a clue that silk was not polished cotton.” This well-written autobiography is more than just the story of Collins’ brush with the famous of the folk world. It is a look at a beloved local girl who fought her demons and survived. Sandra Dallas
FICTION: CRIME
“Ranchero” by Rick Gavin (Minotaur Books)
The Ruston, La., building industry may be taking a bit of a hit. If everything Rick Gavin writes is as good as his first book, his days of framing houses and hanging plasterboard soon could be over.
“Ranchero,” billed as a crime novel but much closer to a comedic romp, takes readers through the Mississippi Delta, introducing them to a variety of characters, including good guys, bad guys and wannabe bad guys.
Gavin’s hero, Nick Reid, a former cop turned repo man, is on the trail of a big-screen TV. He is quickly beaten and tied up. His car, a beautifully restored, calypso coral-colored 1969 Ranchero, is stolen. Reid promised his landlady, who owns the half-car, half-truck, that he would take good care of it. That means he won’t stop until he has recovered the vehicle.
The search for the Ranchero turns into a very colorful trip in an area noted for its music and poverty. It is also noted for its agriculture, with thousands of acres of cotton and soybeans providing not only crops but also most of the beauty in the flatland. Gavin’s descriptions are wonderful, as when he contrasts the poverty-stricken towns to the lush farmland.
“We rolled in an instant out of food stamps and into agribusiness. There might have been chicken fingers and government cheese for the two-legged fauna, but the flora would get no end of what it needed to survive.”
Gavin turns out phrase after phrase of ear-pleasing insight into the Delta and those who live there, and dialogue that sounds just right.
This includes Reid’s 350-pound best friend, Desmond, to a sweet landlady determined to “insist” on giving away a wide variety of things — from the Ranchero to her late husband’s clothes — to everyone she comes across, to a family of crooks named Dubois, a name they couldn’t be bothered to “Frenchify.” (Going by Dew-boys — “front-loaded and hick specific” — was good enough for them.)
And when Gavin waxes funny, he really is funny, with enough comedic situations to keep everyone laughing as Reid tries to recover the Ranchero. Mary Foster, The Associated Press
FICTION: SEPARATED SIBLINGS
“The Sisters” by Nancy Jensen (St. Martin’s Press)
In her debut novel, “The Sisters,” Nancy Jensen essentially applies to a family the concept of “the butterfly effect,” the idea that a small action can eventually lead to significant impacts some other place, some other time.
In the case of sisters Bertie and Mabel, a decision made with good intentions but badly misunderstood leads to a separation and choices that put the women on dramatically different courses. The book then follows not only Bertie and Mabel, but also the girls and women of the two generations who come after them.
The seed for the story was planted when Jensen was a child and learned of the death of her grandmother’s sister, a woman that her grandmother had long kept a secret. Jensen herself was never able to figure out why her grandmother had for so long refused to acknowledge her sibling.
And even though the novel — an enjoyable, easy read — early on allows the reader the privilege of knowing most of the reason why Bertie and Mabel are torn apart, it still has some surprises in the end.
Jensen teaches English at Eastern Kentucky University and has won awards for her short stories.
In “The Sisters,” she devotes special attention to individual characters’ emotional states. She also is careful to put each generation firmly in its own historical context, whether it be the Great Depression or the Vietnam War.
But the reader may want to scream, “Why don’t these people just TALK to each other?”
There’s also another nagging question: How can we really be sure that the children or grandchildren would have been any better or any worse off had Bertie and Mabel not been separated?
The most compelling characters, thus, are the sisters themselves. Their experiences, dreams and regrets give the novel heft and drive the central mystery of the book: Will they ever find each other again? Nahal Toosi, The Associated Press
