Rolling the Bones

By Kyle Jarrard

The fateful kick of Mrs. O'Leary's cow, the wild flight before the flames, the astonishingly quick rebuilding-these are the well-known stories of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. But as much as... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1586420267
• ISBN13: 9781586420260
• Release Date: September 2001
• Publisher: Steerforth Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.24 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 5.8" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

It rocks and rolls.

Rest assured, while reading this review, that I will not give too much of the store away - nothing worse than a review that painstakingly spells out, in too much plot summary detail, what's going to happen, since part of the joy in reading Mr. Kyle Jarrard's splendid second novel "Rolling the Bones" is the narrative drive (achieved by exceeding reader expectation) that progresses all the way to the novel's middle, or rather muddle. Call it the Mexican muddle when one character's life is as stuck as a broken Frank Sinatra record. Note that the ending makes the muddle well worth wading and skimming through. From page one there's tremendous vitality. The writing is exceptionally lucid and the characters, in this character-driven novel, take on complex dimensions as they spring right to life in a small Texas town. At the outset Carl Stein and his fetching wife May, as drifters, land in the settled lives of Carl and Venus Blalock. The dramatic tension builds the more the couples' lives become connected, with the reader - this reader - being spellbound by the nature of Stein's character -- bad apple or peach? -- as he's put to the test while laboring for Blalock's hardware/lumber store. The men bond and the women bond and the writing, again, is lively - a pure joy to read. No slack in it at all. The varying points of view are refreshing, and the crisis action is riveting. Visiting Paris on a journalism assignment, I had the good fortune to interview Mr. Jarrard who brings to his craft an impressive crap detector a la editorial eye sharpened from many years as a senior editor for the International Herald Tribune. He told me that the first thing he does when he sits down to write is cut the previous day's writing in half. The result, let me conclude here, is prose that dazzles. Read this fine book.

I wanted to keep rolling

Jarrard nailed this one ? enticing me through a journey that I hoped would never end. Carl, Venus, May and Carl escort the reader through time and space, loss and discovery, love and death. From a casino in the swamps of Louisiana through the eternal winds across the dry plains of Texas and China, into and out of the womb of Mexico?s heartlands and Pacific coast, Jarrard?s intriguing characters encounter wisdom despite their best efforts in this gripping odyssey through dreams, reality and all points in between. The blend of captivating dialogue and sensual prose left me licking my lips as I tasted and smelled each scene. I can?t wait for his next novel.

Faulkner meets McMurtry meets Vonnegut

It's like William Faulkner meets Larry McMurtry meets Kurt Vonnegut Jr. -- great writing, great story, weird stuff -- taking the reader from smalltown Texas to the jungles of Mexico to the casinos of backwater Louisiana, with a brief sidetrip on an alien spacecraft with JFK, not to mention occasional background music by Sinatra. The author is a Texan who works in Paris as an editor for the International Herald Tribune. I know him personally, so maybe I'm prejudiced, but for me "Rolling the Bones" is rocking 'n' rolling from first page to last. I couldn't put it down until I had finished it.