Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

  (Naples, FL: Speaking Volumes, 2016). ISBN: 979-8-89022-307-4 It was at the West Virginia Writers Conference in 2012 that I first met Western writer R.G. Yoho. We’ve stayed in contact ever since, as he’s steadily gathered awards for his ten classic Westerns, including this one, written for young audiences. Not only am I a lifelong fan of Westerns on the screen and page; I love and write in numerous genres, which are a special type of literature where the tropes are not only expected—they are the criteria by which the reader judges the writer’s specific contributions. While I was reading Destined to Ride Alone , I was also reading the seventeenth book in Louis L’Amour’s Sackett saga and Comanche Moon , the second book in Larry McMurtry’s Gus and Call tetralogy. Although they are each writing for different audiences, Yoho, L’Amour, and McMurtry are all masters of the Western trope. Destined to Ride Alone (the title itself is the trope of all Western tropes) takes as its cent...

  [Translated from Dutch by Vernon Pearce] (Next Chapter, 2025). ISBN: 978-4824156709 In 2021, I was asked to review a novel by an author named Bob Van Laerhoven. Set in South America in a time of revolution and turmoil, Alejandro’s Lie had the kind of depth and dark beauty of story and character that reminded me of Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz , Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s The Shadow of the Wind , and Frank Delaney’s Ireland —novels that you don’t just read; instead, you enter them fully and inhabit them, as they inhabit you. After such a memorable, moving experience, I welcomed the chance to review The Long Farewell , especially when I saw that it took place before and during World War II. Although I’ve long been fascinated by the rise of the Nazis, with all that’s happening today (especially in America, where I reside), I’ve been compelled to read book after book about the years 1938 to 1945. As I started The Long Farewell , I’d just finished one book by Erik La...

  (Beverly, MA: Motorbooks, an imprint of The Quarto Group, 2025). ISBN: 978-0-7603-9148-8 This beautifully designed coffee table book, edited by Jim Hinckley (a statue of whom is a popular Route 66 tourist destination in his hometown of Kingman, Arizona), helps to further the case that the myriad books about the Mother Road that continue to be published are very much like the businesses and attractions on the route itself. Each offers a unique view of the landscape and menu. Although I have read more than twenty books and many articles about Route 66 in the past four years—including titles by Hinckley and some of his coauthors here—I found an impressive amount of new information, which I attribute to not only the authors’ varied experiences, but how those experiences shape their individual approaches to their chapters. More on that to come. No matter how educated you are on the subject matter, chances are excellent you’ll learn something new. The photography in Route 66: 100 Y...

  (Fort Lauderdale, FL: Light on Light Press, 2025). ISBN: 978-1-958921-72-2 It may come as no surprise that I begin this review by lamenting the state of our world. Gaza, Ukraine, Nigeria, Venezuela, Greenland… Grappling with the ramifications and ethics of AI… The condition of the environment and the growing income gap… The nonelected in growing positions of power and policymaking… A cold-blooded murder on a Minneapolis street… Crises in education and healthcare… Living in America, I see all of these issues and more deeply affecting family, friends, and colleagues. We cannot sit hopeless and in fear. That is crystal clear. The level of cognitive dissonance (much of it a highly coordinated, insidious attack on the masses as a means toward greater control by the half-percent) feels, in my 57 years, to be wholly unprecedented—its concentration and ubiquity a result of the wholesale adoption of social media and other carefully crafted-for-control (yes, that word again) technolog...

(Tulsa, OK: Jenkin Lloyd Jones Press, 2021). ISBN: 978-0-9755389-0-6 As I write this review, Tulsa, Oklahoma, is a much talked-about city. It’s the official capital of Route 66 as the Mother Road begins its Centennial celebrations. Beyond Tulsa King , with Sylvester Stallone, and Killers of the Flower Moon (the David Grann book and Martin Scorsese film), The Lowdown , a “love letter to Tulsa” starring Ethan Hawke (announced for a second season recently) has everyone talking. I first fell in love with Tulsa (and realized its sociopolitical complexities) in the summer of 2019, when I was hired to portray Ernesto “Che” Guevara for a 3-week Chautauqua tour that started there. Protests were loud and increased as I moved west across Oklahoma, portraying this controversial physician and revolutionary. I returned 3 years later as Beat poet and activist Allen Ginsberg. The protests came from somewhat separate sectors, but were essentially the same. How fitting to have a police officer stan...

  (Virginia Beach, VA: köehlerbooks, 2025). ISBN: 979-8-88824-930-7 Asa James is a beautifully written, poetic novel rendered in the tone of the time of which it talks. It’s cinematic and evocative, like the great English classics that have endured through time. Supporting and enhancing the text are illustrations of flora and fauna in the part and chapter titles. As we’d expect, the Prologue begins on a proverbial dark and windy New England night in late autumn 1851. Sister Ruth, who co-runs the local poor farm (which services unwed mothers and orphans), finds a baby in a shack in the woods beneath its dead mother. Rats have gotten at the baby’s face… Chapter 1 jumps 24 years, and the baby, our titular character, is now grown into a restless young man with dreams of being a naturalist like Darwin. Asa’s stumbling onto a secret is the novel’s inciting incident; the hero’s call to adventure. Now a stranger in a strange land—economically and socially rather than geographica...