The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 2 July 2013
by Mary Frisbee
During the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 70s, a lot of pulp publishers tried to capitalize on the zeitgeist by putting out small genre-fiction books that had little understanding of the life inside the counterculture. Now, two generations and more later, there has been a small flurry of novels based in that cultural moment. Here, we have the small mystery novel, generally conventional in structure and expected turns, with its spunky and precocious female protagonist. It has been thirty years since Trout Brooke's hippie parents vanished along with the inhabitants of the Satori Ranch commune on which they lived in the rainy lush Oregon woods. She has gone one to live a rich life as an artist and teacher, living in what can only be described as a playhouse in Montana. She gets word that her parents' bones have been found in an abandoned VW microbus in an overgrown marijuana patch back at the commune, left there, apparently, all this time after the commune was mysteriously abandoned. What ensues for Brooke is an improbable cross-country investigation in which she tracks down the various inhabitants of Satori to get their stories about what happened on a fateful summer's day in 1976. The elements of mystery and investigation, Brooke's sudden access to unlimited funds to get the story to move along without the considerations of practical limits, moments of excessive explanatory exposition, convenient bureaucratic delays, these all to serve to give the reader the clunky impression of a writer impatient with the limits of storytelling. This is an unfortunate aspect of this book, because when Frisbee turns to the cultural elements of Brooke's tale, her lost hippie parents and their dreams of a forest Utopia, she brings forth many of the key points of a historical story, almost lost in myth. There are realistic flaws in communal life, and unexpected turns in the lives of those who have gone on from there. Frisbee catches a mood and has moments in which the discriptive note hits the mark of nostalgia, regret, and the unexpected paths lives take. It almost doesn't matter whodunnit in this mystery. It seems to matter less to the author who wanted more to describe a cultural history. This she accomplishes in moments during this uneven, fast-moving novel.
(This is the first book reviewed on this site that, as of this writing appears in e-book form only.)
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