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Review: Heart of Junk by Luke Geddes



Blurb from Goodreads:
A hilarious debut novel about an eclectic group of merchants at a Kansas antique mall who become implicated in the kidnapping of a local beauty pageant star.

The city of Wichita, Kansas, is wracked with panic over the abduction of toddler pageant princess Lindy Bobo. However, the dealers at The Heart of America Antique Mall are too preoccupied by their own neurotic compulsions to take much notice. Postcards, perfume bottles, Barbies, vinyl records, kitschy neon beer signs—they collect and sell it all.

Rather than focus on Lindy, this colorful cast of characters is consumed by another drama: the impending arrival of Mark and Grant from the famed antiques television show Pickin’ Fortunes, who are planning to film an episode at The Heart of America and secretly may be the last best hope of saving the mall from bankruptcy. Yet the mall and the missing beauty queen have more to do with each other than these vendors might think, and before long, the group sets in motion a series of events that lead to surprising revelations about Lindy’s whereabouts. As the mall becomes implicated in her disappearance, will Mark and Grant be scared away from all of the drama or will they arrive in time to save The Heart of America from going under?

Equally comical and suspenseful, Heart of Junk is also a biting commentary on our current Marie Kondo era. It examines why certain objects resonate with us so deeply, rebukes Kondo’s philosophy of wholesale purging, and argues that “junk” can have great value—connecting us not only to our personal pasts but to our shared human history. As author Luke Geddes writes: “A collection was a record of a life lived, maybe not well or happily but at least with attention and passion. It was autobiography made whole.”
My Review:
 
This was SO good -- hard to describe but I was immediately immersed and this one was hard to put down.  I loved the language, the characters and everything about this book.  Such a unique setting and the way in which the stories were told through objects was superb.  This is a debut but I am excited to read more by this author!

Heart of Junk comes out later this month on January 21, 2020, and you can purchase HERE.  I loved this book, great to start the year!!
But now if Village Green could sound fresh to him after all these years, who knew? It was possible he could reenter the sweet zone of anything, maybe even as foundational a song as "I Want to Hold Your Hand." Lee was not young. The best days of his life were far behind him. If his only ambition was to avoid major tragedies such as disfiguring injuries and debilitating destitution while taking solace in his record collection, he supposed he could live with that. He would list only to pop music from now on, he decided, whether as sophisticated as Pet Sounds or as vapid as Ohio Express--or hell, even the Sodashoppe Teens.

Comments

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    ReplyDelete

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