Mike’s Reviews > Lost Daughter > Status Update

"I'm so used to that look-alike crap that I was starting to think speed tasted like coffee."

I tried to say "Thanks for bringing me home," but I sounded like a lobotomized parrot speaking Yiddish.

This may look like an ordinary late-80s neo-noir mass-market paperback. Maybe it is. But the spirit of the times is contained within. The Cubs eternally cursed. Baseball on the radio. Young people on the run. Characters who casually become cops, then musicians, then detectives. Black Beauty speed and '73 Skylarks. Nights at home when the only options for company were the telephone or dreams.

The Chicago Cubs being cursed for all eternity seems a significant, if outdated, undercurrent in the story. The main character is a Sox fan however, and listens to their games on the radio. Baseball on the radio...it was a different time. "After Memorial Day, Sox fans clean up on the Cubbies; sometimes it's so easy it isn't even much fun."

The Chicago Cubs being cursed for all eternity seems a significant, if outdated, undercurrent in the story. The main character is a Sox fan however, and listens to their games on the radio. Baseball on the radio...it was a different time. "After Memorial Day, Sox fans clean up on the Cubbies; sometimes it's so easy it isn't even much fun."

I read and enjoyed the first 60 or so pages of this in the middle of a night before a snow day back in February. Been sitting on my desk ever since. That's the kind of reading year it's been. But getting back into it, it feels like a punkier 80s update on Night Moves, one of my favorite movies. "I'm 35 and all I really want to do is sit in bed and play guitar. Can't find anybody to pay me for that, though."

"I kicked with the power and precision of a tubercular wino."

He picked at the cassettes on the seat between us. "Replacements? Husker Du? The Psychedelic Furs?" He made the names sound like incurable diseases. "What the hell is this shit?"

"Rock 'n' roll."

"The Eagles and the Doobie Brothers. That was rock 'n' roll."

"If you're eighty."

"Have you accepted Christ into your life? Are you a Christian?"

I nodded. I always humor the religious.

For two hundred dollars a day I'd promise to find Jimmy Hoffa.