Joey Madia, New Mystics Reviews

  “Mothers (and More!) on the Mother Road”: A Review of Aprons Away: Women’s Work on Route 66 by Cheryl Eichar Jett (Reedy Press, 2025). ISBN: 978-1-68106-634-9 Stories about America’s fabled Main Street, Route 66 (John Steinbeck’s “The mother road, the road of flight”), are legion and, in this centennial year, the new books being published are also nearly so. I have reviewed a few of them, including one edited by my friend and colleague Jim Hinckley, Route 66: 100 Years , for which Cheryl Eichar Jett wrote the (excellent) chapter on Illinois. Jett is an accomplished author, known for her writing on Illinois and for her six books for Arcadia Publishing’s popular Images of America series, and it was my recent pleasure to hear her speak in Tulsa, Oklahoma, about her latest book. Despite the endless coffee table and travel guides published in the past 36 years, which have led to a full-throttle revival of the Mother Road, little attention has been paid to minority populations, who...

  (Next Chapter, 2026). ASIN: B0GGXYZVRD Over the years, I have come to expect a lot from Bob van Laerhoven’s novels and this one not only doesn’t disappoint—it might just be the best one yet. The prologue begins in Munich in April 1920 with an evocative diary entry by an unidentified author, written to a dead brother about his murdered dog; it’s barely a page. The novel repeatedly returns to excerpts from the diary, identifying the author only as a rabid antisemite who identifies with Parcival, the Grail Quests, Lohengrin, and the Spear of Destiny and who twists the words of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas to suit his warped, weaponized Weltanschauung . Chapter one opens in April 1921, when antisemitism was already ubiquitous, with lyrics from a cabaret song about cocaine. It’s a time when the “People’s Court” in the Berlin-Plötzensee prison still dispenses “justice” by beheading. A German psychiatrist eyes an exotic, “half-Chinese” woman in the sweltering heat with obvious add...