A Motel of the Mind

If you buy this book, you'll have the pleasure of being an insider . What I mean is that the essays have passed under the main-stream critical radar and will have to subsist and travel and live on word of mouth. Brody and Amdahl are excellent foils for each other. Both haunted and passionate, but about different aspects of life and in different voices. She's witty and generous of heart, he's darkly funny and bitter about a lot of stuff (but loyal to a few sure creatures and places.) Their emotions are intelligent, which means the writing is good and savory. Brody writes about taking her stepmother to Italy after her father's death. Amdahl drives cross-country with a sick vomiting beloved dog. And that covers only two essays. The rest are just as good. Reading Motel of the Mind, you won't be alone in a Motel 6. You'll have some really good, if somewhat renegade company. A finger of scotch wouldn't be a bad idea. You're going to be covering a lot of ground, so fortify yourself.

One of my favorite things is to read purely for pleasure, then feel when I have finished a book that I can carry something significant and personally enriching from the experience. This book provided me one of those rare occasions. The authors display an artistry with the language that is both compelling in narrative content and thoughtful in execution. Both of the writers use distinctly different frames of reference and ways of contemplating the events detailed in the 5 stories to make the reader an intimate part of the journey. I was surprised at how easily and quickly each brought me into their consciousness. Brody's Red Star Sister was one of the better books I read in the last 2 years, and I feel that her stories in this book equal or surpass that effort, I highly recommend it.

A Motel of the Mind seduces, with its title, with its cover, with every sentence of the book. Try it. If you read the first couple of sentences, you will read the whole book. I read it in one sitting, thinking, at each break (there are five essays), "Oh, I'll save the rest for later." But no, I couldn't check out until I was finished. If you like gorgeous prose and intelligent, you will want this book to read again and again.