Lydia

February 21, 2011
Picking up the characters from his GroVant trilogy, published 15 years ago, Sandlin returns to the small Wyoming town where it all began. Newbies can quickly get up to speed on the major players despite the convoluted plot: narrator Sam Callahan; his aimless adult daughter, Shannon; and his mother, Lydia, recently released from prison after a long-ago attempt to poison Ronald Reagan's dog. Lydia's parole requires writing the life story of centenarian Oly Pedersen, but then she hatches a scheme for a road trip to California (taking along Oly) so Roger, a young man unofficially adopted by Sam, might discover his origins. Meanwhile, the terrifying Leroy, who dumped Roger off on friends years ago, is hunting him now, believing Roger must die for the universe to achieve balance. The story itself fails to live up to Sandlin's quirky, colorful characters: Oly's pretend catatonia; Sam's star-worship of Roger's possible father, who wrote Yeast Infection; Lydia's conniving self-absorption; Shannon's bizarre ideas on seduction. And a dissonant tonality develops as a result of all the "zany" juxtaposed against Oly's serious narrative, whether true, or, as Lydia believes, concocted. More troubling, though, is the first-person POV that continually takes the reader out of the narrative flow. So much of the story occurs without Sam's attendance that confusion reigns; how can he possibly know what everyone's doing?

Starred review from March 1, 2011
The latest in Sandlins GroVont series, this ribald tale centers around Lydia, a fiftysomething rebel freshly released from prison for attempting to kill President Reagans dog via a poisoned chew toy. She travels home to GroVont, Wyoming, where her son, Sam, is the owner of a boardinghouse for pregnant teens. Roger, an adolescent with a mysterious past, also works there, and the newly freed Lydia thinks she has information on Rogers past. While Lydia records the life story of Oly, a geriatric centenarian, for her parole-enforced community service, Roger decides he must speak with the author of a novel that may describe his past. Lydia, Oly, and Roger set off on a cross-country journey of discovery. On the trip, love blossoms unexpectedly for Roger while something much darker ripens inside Lydia. Oly presents his thoroughly entertaining biography throughout the triptaking them through WWI, 1920s Paris, and severe heartbreakwhile Roger comes closer to danger than he ever suspected. A wonderfully woven tapestry of stories, this gem of a novel is as audacious as it is sentimental and ends on a shocking note that no one could have predicted.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)