Into the Valley

Starred review from June 15, 2015
It’s 1967, and 30-year-old B. has moved to San Francisco from Boston. To ease intense bouts of dizziness, she uses skills picked up from an on-again, off-again lover: she begins cashing counterfeit checks and buys a Mustang, then heads for California’s flat, desolate Central Valley, hoping the new, simpler surroundings will help curb her spells. B. wanders from town to town, meets locals, and contemplates a permanent move to these meeker environs. Yet as time passes, she finds that her “carsickness” (as she calls it) vanishes only when she is inside a bank, casually conning a teller out of hundreds of dollars. B.’s episodic encounters gel as the novel progresses—certain moments, particularly B.’s interaction with
a lonesome college professor, provide memorable anchors—and she eventually takes on a teenage hippie as a companion, who questions the source of B.’s riches. Galm’s debut is precisely written and casually paced, and this works to the novel’s advantage, reinforcing the limitations of the rural areas B. encounters while acting as a strong contrast to scenes of counterfeiting, which B. grows increasingly dependent on. A standout debut.

A late 1960s road trip fueled by fake checks and real desperation.B. doesn't know exactly where she's going, but she's definitely leaving San Francisco. A nausea-"the carsickness"-that has haunted her for years has recently made her unable to function, and she's found that she only gets relief, temporarily, from passing counterfeit checks at local banks. Her trip meanders from town to town, punctuated by a new bank in each one, and is leavened only by the obsessive attention she pays to her appearance. B. is adrift not only in the Central Valley, but in life-she doesn't want to live like her mother, trapped beneath her hair and her girdle, but is also horrified by the counterculture girls who don't wear gloves and don't seem to know what a wash-and-set is. As the trip continues, B.'s attention to the trappings of femininity wanes, even as she reveres the way her dresses, nails, and makeup allow her to pass the checks she increasingly needs to keep her sanity. B. meets other people on her travels and is disappointed by every one-none can calm the restless carsickness, and in fact, she only feels worse as each day passes, even after reconnecting with the source of her fake checks. Galm's writing is rich and evokes the desolation of the Central Valley and B.'s mental state. B. is troubled but observant both of herself and her surroundings, and her observations form the bones of the novel as she unravels. Fittingly, the book ends indistinctly, still disentangling as she falls. Readers may be as confused and frustrated by B. as she is by herself, but they'll appreciate Galm's fantastic writing and the new view of an overexposed slice of American history. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from August 1, 2015
After learning the art of counterfeiting checks from a sleazy boyfriend, B. flees the unstable San Francisco of the late 1960s for the sparse California Central Valley in her Mustangpurchased with a phony check. Searching for some solace, B. fights against what she calls the carsickness, a generalized anxiety brought on by close quarters and contact with strangers, which is only remedied by passing counterfeit checks and driving aimlessly. Unmarried, 30 years old, a working woman transplanted from the East, B. is caught between the rigid roles for women of her time: hippie, career girl, mother, and wife. She is none of these, nor does she want to be. Galm's novel captures a time and place full of contradictions. Her meandering prose moves as aimlessly as B.'s Mustang down the country roads of California, but at the same time she pinpoints specific markers along the way: the changing California landscape, bohemian counterculture, and shifting roles for women in the late 1960s. This is a natural for anyone who loves Joan Didion's workespecially her nonfiction critiques on California and that other classic of aimless driving, Play It as It Lays.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)