3.0
Wonderkid
ByPublisher Description
The Wonderkids are living the dream: sold-out concerts, screaming fans, TV shows, number-one hits. Unfortunately, it's because the lead singer, Blake Lear, made a deal—wild success in exchange for transforming the band into a children's entertainment act. Now the seats are packed with grade schoolers instead of cool hipsters, and the television appearances happen on Saturday morning. But hey, rock and roll has always been for the kids, right?
The money is good, and things go very right—until they go very wrong. The temptations of the road are many, and the Wonderkids are big kids, too. Narrated by a boy whom Blake adopts on a whim, who becomes the band's disciple, merch guy, amateur psychologist, and—eventually—damage control guru,
is a delirious and surprisingly touching novel of the dangers of compromise, thwarted ambition, and fathers and sons, told with tremendous humor and energy.
"If Stace's latest novel, his fourth, rings true, it's because he is writing what he knows. For 25 years, he performed smart indie rock under the pseudonym John Wesley Harding . . . A great rock 'n' roll novel."
"Deliciously entertaining." —
"[
is] sweet and funny and knowing—and this is me, holding up my lighter for more." —Joshua Ferris, National Book Award finalist and author of
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesWonderkid Reviews
3.0
“The beginning and the end seemed too slow. The story doesn't really pick up until you finally learn who your narrator is and seems to continue on for far too long in the post tour synopsis. But such is life, and I think that might be the point. The middle was wonderful.”
“Parts of it were funny and entertaining, it certainly feels like a fall through the rabbit hole....gone very, very wrong. At first I thought the narrative was a bit dragged but in the end it was what redeemed it. The narrator became the best part of the book and the reason you wan't to keep reading. I wanted to know what happened to him, I liked him, I was rooting for him. The other characters? Not so much.”
About Wesley Stace
Wesley Stace is the author of three widely acclaimed novels:
, selected by the
and Amazon as one of the best novels of the year;
, one of the New York Public Library's 2007 Books To Remember; and
, one of the
's best fiction books of 2011. He has released fifteen albums under the name John Wesley Harding and has appeared on
,
, and
. He is the founder of the Cabinet of Wonders variety show, which has featured appearances by Rosanne Cash, Colson Whitehead, and Joshua Ferris, among many others, and which can be heard on NPR. He contributes frequently to the
and lives in Philadelphia.
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