Still Life Las Vegas

June 1, 2015
Sie’s debut novel is an often mesmerizing look at grief and coming of age. Walter Stahl works at a Vegas tourist attraction, killing time after finishing his high school coursework months before graduation. Walter and his father, Owen, moved to Vegas when Walter’s grief-stricken mom, Emily, vanished after an accident that killed her daughter, Georgia. Against flashbacks showing both Emily’s flight from the Midwest and Owen’s search for her, Walter meets two talented living statues, the brother and sister Chrysto and Acacia, and finds himself falling in love with Chrysto. Sie’s admirable ambition leads to occasional stumbles. In addition to playing with time and character viewpoints, the book becomes a graphic novel for certain sequences; the scope eventually contains Emily’s childhood (which includes a crucial moment the reader will see coming). Though the flow is occasionally uneven, the resulting story is engrossing, more than enough to make up for the slight flaws.

June 1, 2015
A boy with a tragic past comes of age in Las Vegas. "Asians can't figure me out, and it drives them nuts. I'm like Asian, but stretched tall. Long body, small features. Curly dark hair. Like one of those long-necked aliens with a wig." Self-esteem is not Walter Stahl's long suit, but at 17, he hasn't had much to make him feel good about himself. His mother, Emily, took off when he was 5 in the wake of a tragedy that left his father, already damaged by loss, ruined beyond repair. Imagining that Emily has fled to Las Vegas, father and son follow her there-but the years pass without any sign. These days, Walter is scanning for Vietnamese-looking women among the visitors who tour the Viva Las Vegas! museum, where he's a guide. In parallel with his tale is woven an earlier narrative, one that tracks Emily from the time she backed out of the driveway in her blue Volvo and hit the road. Parts of the story are told in graphic novel form, which works quite well, and there are also reproductions of pages from Walter's sketchbook. His favorite subjects are two human statues at the Venice Venice hotel, Apollo and Diana, who turn out to be a brother and sister from Greece. "I've spent hours studying his body....the deep cleft of his hairless chest, the line that begins at his hip and swoops down to touch upon his fig leaf and curve back up to the other hip, that shadow that runs along the side of his thigh from his knee to the perfect roundness of his ass...." Clearly, Walter's on the verge of learning something new about himself. Sie's debut novel is a bit weighed down by all the darkness he's loaded in: there are too many deaths and betrayals, too many back stories and digressions, too many Greek myths; also, it's disappointing when a major plotline turns out to be a fantasy. Tries too hard to do too much but is likable anyway.

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June 1, 2015
Seventeen-year-old Walt lives on the seamy side of Las Vegas with his clinically depressed father. What has brought them there? The short answer: a search for Walt's mother, who, a dozen years earlier, abandoned them in Wisconsin and fled west. There's more to the parents' story than that, of course, and what has happened to them is revealed in a series of flashbacks. As for Walt, he tells us his story in his own first-person voice; he tells us about his dead-end job working at a cheesy museum, about his dream of finding his mother, about taking care of his helpless father, and, most important, about falling in love with beautiful Chrysto, a Greek boy who works in a palatial casino hotel as a living statue. The stories are haunting, a quality that is beautifully captured by artist Choi's interpolated graphic-novel chapters that expand and complement the text. Sie's first novel is richly imagined and beautifully written with a well-realized setting and memorable characters. Together they make for an altogether auspicious debut.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)