Reviews for Bluesman

The average rating for Bluesman based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-09-24 00:00:00 David Ledford This is a coming of age story. The setting is small-town Massachusetts, the summer of 1967. Leo Suther, seventeen years of age, falls for Allie Donovan. Of course, she is pretty. She is sixteen. Both have just completed their junior year in high school. The summer lies ahead. She is working in the village café. He is working for Allie's father. He is one of a team of four constructing a house from scratch. Take one guess what happens. Let me put this straight right from the start. The story, the plotline, is conventional. This is why I am not giving it more stars. It is how the story is told that makes it worth reading. The prose and the dialog are what attract. An atmosphere is drawn that is pitch-perfect for the sixties. Hot summer days and kids brimming over, pulsing with sex. They scarcely understand what is happening to themselves. There is a lot of talk about penises and boobs and masturbation and sex. If this is going to bother you, then skip the book. The thing is, at this age, one is turned on to sex. It is not the sex that is particularly well drawn, but all the rest--the kids, their parents, the place, the era, the blues. Dubus captures how it is to be young and alive. He also captures the confusion typical of adolescence. The sixties were the so-called age of free-love. All was allowed. Right? Or was it? These kids are caught up in the dilemma of figuring out what they want to do with their lives. They are kids of working-class families. They are not academics. The Vietnam War menaces, but what in reality do they understand of that? It is distant. It is not of their everyday world. No longer tethered to parents, they are free, but free to do what? It is this they do not know. Leo is drawn to music; he has been raised by a father with music in his bones. His mother died when he was five. Over this summer he learns about his mom, about her poetry, about how his parents met and fell in love. And of the importance of the blues in their lives. The blues is the music they were swept up in and Leo is swept up in blues music too. The blues sets the tone for the book. A tune, a ditty, the plucking of a guitar string, harmonicas and blues harps, a game of poker, a six-pack of cold beer--these are the backdrop of the tale. The low pitched melodies that typify blues songs evoke a sadness and a mystery that encompass the tale told. The author reads the audiobook. I cannot imagine the book read by anyone but him. I don't really like how it is read; his tone is so flat. The thing is, the flat droning tone perfectly fits a book so intimately tied to the blues. For this reason, I have given the narration four stars. It should be read just as it is read. ************** *Townie 4 stars *Bluesman 3 stars *House of Sand and Fog 3 stars

Review # 2 was written on 2016-10-05 00:00:00 Hamilton David The unfortunate side effect of an amazing book. Quite common, occurs more frequently than not. To what do I refer? The next book one reads by that author. To be fair, Andre Sinus III's "Bluesman" was published long before "The House of Sand and Fog" (this is notably his debut novel), but the result is the same. Try as I might to be reasonable, high expectations that are almost certainly not met. A great book, by all means. "Bluesman" follows Leo Suther in his final year before adulthood. It is the summer of 1967, and friends are being drafted for the Vietnam War. Leo lives in a small Massachusetts town in the Connecticut River Valley with Jim, his father. He falls in love with local beauty Allie Donovan, son of Chick Donovan, a man who hires him for construction/roofing for the summer and he soon finds out to be a devout Marxist Communist. He is also pursuing his other lifelong love- for the harmonica, spending time with his father (who plays the guitar) and Ryder, a harmonica/harp player that teaches him everything he knows. He begins more intimate conversations with his father, discovering his late mother's inner life through her diaries. He suffers ups and downs in his sometimes confused love for girlfriend Allie and impulsively rushes into a series of dangerous decisions, including a pregnancy and culminating in his enlistment in the Army. Like in his other works, Dubus series with compassion and empathy. The characters are what make the novel. The overall tone of the novel is kept low, however. Nothing greatly emotionally charged like "The House of Sand and Fog". The problem is, many things great importance happen to Leo during the summer, but somehow do not really transform him, and the reader is left hanging. He makes his decisions, but they are all forced upon him and he makes them with little thought. One anticipates that the learning and growing will come later, but we area left without the details of this. A sweet coming of age story, well written and especially commendable for its addressing of communism and discrimination (Ryder is black, homosexuality was hinted at), the exploration of the music world and the blues, and the examination of what young men likely felt during the years of the Vietnam War.