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| 📕10-word summary: A healing NYC family’s year preceding the John Lennon’s assassination. 🖌6-word review: Fascinating male relationships. Excellently paced plot. |
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| 💭Favorite quote: “When, once in a blue moon, they fought, it was scary, in the way arguments can be between smart people who know exactly how to hurt each other.” | |||||||||
| 🎓A new-to-me word: SRO | |||||||||
| Description:* It’s the fall of 1979 in New York City when 23-year-old Anton Winter, back from the Peace Corps and on the mend from a nasty bout of malaria, returns to his childhood home in the Dakota. Anton’s father, the famous late-night host Buddy Winter, is there to greet him, himself recovering from a breakdown. Before long, Anton is swept up in an effort to reignite Buddy’s stalled career, a mission that takes him from the gritty streets of New York, to the slopes of the Lake Placid Olympics, to the Hollywood Hills, to the blue waters of the Bermuda Triangle, and brings him into close quarters with the likes of Johnny Carson, Ted and Joan Kennedy, and a seagoing John Lennon. But the more Anton finds himself enmeshed in his father’s professional and spiritual reinvention, the more he questions his own path, and fissures in the Winter family begin to threaten their close bond. *From goodreads.com’s synopsis. |
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| Thoughts: I saw this book in a BookBub email, and since I recently read The Address, which was about The Dakota apartment building in NYC, the fact that it was part of this title caught my eye. While the building was a “major character” in The Address, it played a comparatively small part in this story. As is often the case with historical fiction, I wondered how much of the story was historically factual and how much of it was fiction. John Lennon played a big part in this story, and at first, each time it said he did something, I wondered if he really did that and looked it up. (e.g., owned a sailboat named “Isis.”) Checking everything soon became untenable, and it didn’t really matter in this story. There were 2 things about this story that I loved: 1) the male relationships — specifically those between Anton and his father, Buddy; Anton and his brother, Kip; and Anton and John Lennon, and 2) this story moved right along; a typical example being when one paragraph mentioned that something was going to happen in 3 weeks (and arguably, it’s the thing you’re most interested in seeing how it plays out), and in the very next paragraph, it’s 3 weeks later. No waiting until the next chapter with filler or another storyline, or anything like that. | |||||||||
See the rest of the books I’ve read in 2025 and previous years: 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019.