The Amazing Adventures of Aaron Broom

May 14, 2018
Hotchner returns to fiction more than 20 years after his last novel, Louisiana Purchase, with this slight but amiable layering of thinly disguised autobiography and Depression-era mystery. While 12-year-old Aaron Broom’s consumptive mother languishes in a sanitarium, he and his father skip from one St. Louis apartment to another just before the rent is due. One June day, Aaron waits outside while his father tries to interest a jewelry store in the watches he sells. The store is robbed and a man is killed just after Fred Broom enters, and Fred is detained by the police. Alone and homeless—the Brooms have been evicted again—Aaron enlists friends old and new to help him find the killer and free his dad, who is being held as a material witness in the unsolved crime. Much of the fictional Aaron’s life is familiar from King of the Hill, Hotchner’s 1972 autobiographical novel, and though the material was fresher there, this version is not without its old-fashioned charm.

May 15, 2018
From 100-year-old Hotchner (Hemingway in Love, 2015, etc.), noted biographer of Hemingway, Doris Day, and others, comes this slender, sweet-tempered boy-sleuth tale set in Depression-era St. Louis.At 12, Aaron Broom is precocious. With his mother interned in a tuberculosis sanitarium and his rent-jumping, electricity-pirating salesman dad just scraping by, he has to be. The novel begins briskly, with Aaron left outside to protect their precious truck from the repo men while his father goes into a jewelry store to ply his company's watches. When his father is buzzed inside with his bulky sample case, Aaron sees a heavyset man scurry in behind him. Then he hears shots and sees the display window shatter and the man flee while stashing his gun in his waistband. Soon Aaron's father is escorted out in handcuffs, and Aaron, by now eavesdropping on the assembled officers, discovers that his dad has been taken in as a material witness and possible accomplice. He will be kept without bail. Aaron, suddenly on his own, soon determines that the only way of getting his father released is to do a bit of "detectifying" and unmask the culprit himself. He begins to investigate the jewelry store's employees, enlisting the aid of a motley group of kids and adults: a newspaper street vendor, an epileptic ex-neighbor girl who lives in a Hooverville near the river, a maritime lawyer, the kindly palooka who manages the building where Aaron and his father have been living. Are there extremely convenient plot twists? Yes. Implausibilities, shortcuts? Fine. Could this all be derided as sepia-toned hokum? Sure. But Hotchner's storytelling is fast-paced, his feel for period detail sure-handed, his vision of humanity-facing-adversity persistently sunny, and his regard for the boy's resourcefulness contagious.A brisk, winsome caper.

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April 15, 2018
When 12-year-old Aaron's father is inadvertently involved in a murder and taken into custody in handcuffs as a material witness, the boy decides to do some detectifying, as he puts it, in an effort to free his innocent father, who simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. His efforts would make the Hardy Boys envious as, with the help of a clutch of friends and a kindhearted attorney, Aaron begins putting together the pieces of an intricate puzzle that will lead him to a court denouement reminiscent of Perry Mason. In the meantime, virtually penniless, he has taken up residence in a St. Louis Hooverville?yes, the novel is set during the Depression, and its verisimilitude is one of this nostalgic tale's strong points. Now a centenarian, Hotchner has obviously lost none of his writer's chops. With an appealing protagonist and a feel-good, slightly old-fashioned story, the venerable author's latest is a diverting exercise in storytelling that is sure to delight his many fans.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

March 1, 2018

The author of international best sellers such as Papa Hemingway and cofounder, with Paul Newman, of Newman's Own (great recommendations!), Hotchner takes us through Depression-era St. Louis as young Aaron Broom seeks to prove that his father wasn't responsible for a jewelry store robbery gone haywire.

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