PLUMAS DE MUERTE: Tequila Journals and Dreams by Phil Motel @philmotel

5 out of 5 stars

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How I discovered this book: Already a fan.

In a Nutshell:  Non-fiction: memoir, journal entries and poems.

The Blurb: 
Life in a long-stay motel, overseen by the on-site muscle: 'if this was a movie, he'd be played by Steve Buscemi'. Twelve-hour shifts at a mundane job alongside a host of strange characters with their own struggle to make it to the end of the day. Anecdotes from journals of adventures past: wannabe musicians, ill-fated relationships and the bottom of a bottle.

Musings on life, death, dreams, and the frustrations of the writing process: the journal entries were written while during the creation of the author's debut novel, Rum Hijack.

Dream Diary
The second part of Plumas de Muerte is as it says: a small collection of dreams: what goes on while we are asleep?

A raw ride that makes no attempt to gloss over the darker side of the author's life at the time, while acting as a cautionary tale about the nightmare of substance abuse - and the final road of alcoholism/addiction.


My review:
The 'Tequila Journals', the first part of this book, makes up 80% of the whole.  There are two main settings: an unnamed place of work, and the motel in which the diarist lives.  Doesn't sound very thrilling?  It is.  PM is one of those scribes who has the knack of making an after-work beer in a fast food establishment or wrangles over his room rent with the seedy 'Steve Buscemi' as riveting as any 'fast-paced' action thriller. I once noted that memoir writer Val Poore managed to bring tears to my eyes in a short chapter about the lighting of oil lamps.  This was similar; it's not the subject matter, but the innate talent of the writer.  

When I got nearer to the end I felt that, although maybe not meant as such, it does make up an actual story.  We see how PM's frustration with his working life and writing increases, how he becomes jaded with (and fails to chase up) possible romantic opportunities, how his depression about events from the past deepens, his drinking becomes more and more out of hand, until happiness visits his life once more, only to be ripped away—and sends his life spiralling completely out of control.  At the end, I turned over the page and thought, 'What, no more?  But what happens next?'.  I'm hoping he will write the next 'chapter' at some point.

One of my favourite sections in the Tequila Journals was a look back at a crazy, chaotic time spent in Colorado, which reminded me of a Kerouac novel, though there's nothing pretentious, plagiarised or 'wannabe' about PM's writing style; it's unique, and appears to be the sort of effortless that tells me he doesn't realise how good he is.  Throughout, every character is perfectly captured in just a couple of lines of dialogue.

The dream diary at the end: I am one of those who dislikes dream sequences in films or books, and suppresses yawns when people go into detail about a dream they had, but I liked these; they were well put together, not rambling, and the style and structure varied.  Also, having read the book, I could see what was behind some of them—some aspects of loss, isolation and anger.

I've read the novel, Rum Hijack, that PM was writing at the time these journal entries were made, and I loved it, but in a way I like some aspects of this collection even more.  Includes some relevant artwork and photos.  Highly, highly recommended.

HANDS UP by Stephen Clark #RBRT

4 out of 5 stars

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How I discovered this book: it was submitted to Rosie's Book Review Team, of which I am a member.

In a Nutshell: Family/psychological drama dealing with murder: racially motivated or not?  Set in Philadelphia.

An interesting crime novel that's more psychological drama than thriller.  It centres around Ryan Quinn, a police officer who shoots and kills Tyrell Wakefield, a young black man pulled over in a routine traffic enquiry—or is it?  As the story progresses, we become more aware of racial profiling within the police, and especially that of Quinn's partner, Greg.  More sinisterly, this same bigotry is present within the 'civilian' white families we meet in this book.

Also centre stage are Jade, Tyrell's sister, and Kelly, his estranged father.  The story is written from these three points of view; Quinn is written in the first person, which totally worked for me, with Jade and Kelly in the third.  This also worked, I think, better than if Kelly and Jade had been in the first person as well.  They were all three-dimensional; Kelly, in particular, alternated in my head between being a basically decent guy who wanted to make up for some wrong choices in life, and an opportunistic creep. 

I very much liked how the truth about what happened that night, from Quinn's point of view, came out only gradually, and that we saw the emotional effects of the case from all three sides.

When I began to read the book the first thing that struck me was that the author can certainly write; I was drawn in, immediately, though the first ten per cent includes a fair bit of telling-not-showing (when the writer tells the reader how someone is feeling/what their personality is like, rather than showing it in dialogue and actions), and, throughout, there is too much mundane detail—we don't always need, for instance, to know what people were wearing, unless relevant, what they ate in restaurants (ditto), or how someone got from A to B.  I read in the notes at the back that the author is a (most successful) journalist, and this is evident; now and again, I felt as though he needed to be reminded that a novel's flow can be improved by the omission of detail, rather than the inclusion of every fact.

Mostly, the plot kept me interested throughout, though I didn't think the romantic involvement between Quinn and another character towards the end of the book was necessary; a friendship/sympathetic connection would have been enough, and more realistic; that it happened made both characters less credible, to me.  I also felt that Quinn's previous romantic entanglement was too quickly and neatly disposed of.

On the whole, though, I liked this novel, and it has a lot going for it.  The issues of racial prejudice and police corruption were dealt with well, and though none of the characters were likeable, they were all fairly compelling.  I think that if Mr Clark were to learn the art of ruthless pruning during redrafts and observe how other writers create tension, he could produce something most memorable.